System Setup and benchmarking notes
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmarks with your own.
- Intel Pentium 4 1600MHz S478 Northwood CPU
- VIA P4PA P4X266A
- ABIT SD7-533 SiS 645, run in DDR333 mode (BIOS 7S)
- ABIT TH7II-RAID I850 with 256MB (2 x 128MB) of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS (BIOS TH738)
- EpoX 4BDA2+ I845D (BIOS 0502)
Common components
- Creative Geforce4 Ti 4600 clocked at stock speeds (300/660)
- 256MB Samsung PC2700 run at strictest timings (common for all 3 DDR motherboards)
- 120GB Western Digital 120JB 7200rpm hard drive with 8MB cache.
- Liteon 32x12x40 CDRW
- Liteon 16x DVD
- Samcheer 420w PSU
- 21" Sony G500 FD monitor
- D-Link 530TX NIC
- Sonic Fury Soundcard
- Lian-Li PC60 Aluminium Case
Software
- Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
- Detonator XP 28.32 drivers
- Sisoft Sandra 2002 Professional
- Pifast v41
- Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with RazorLame 1.15 front-end
- XMpeg 4.2A DVD encoding, DivX 5.0 CODEC
- Ocuk SETI benchmark
- PCMark 2002
- 3DMark 2000
- 3DMark 2001SE
- Comanche 4 benchmark
- Serious Sam 2 Demo
- Quake 3 v1.30
We feel it only fair to compare the VIA P4PA's performance against the motherboards that it will be inevitably be up against. Therefore, we're directly comparing it to the ABIT TH7II-RAID (I850), ABIT SD7-533, (SiS645) and EpoX 4BDA2+ (I845D) respectively. The SD7-533 will be run in PC2700 memory mode for maximum performance.
All benchmarks were conducted at 1024x768x32 100Hz with vertical sync' disabled. Benchmarks were run 3 times consecutively, an average score was taken. All three systems were configured for maximum performance.
All four motherboards operate at a slightly different frequency when set to 1600MHz in BIOS. The difference isn't great, but could affect results if they are initially close. I've normalised all benchmarks to the VIA P4PA's operating speed of 1612.27MHz.
