Review: ABIT BD7-II RAID

Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.

• Intel Pentium4 2266MHz S478 Northwood CPU Northwood B
• ABIT BD7II-RAID I845E run at DDR266 and DDR354 modes

Common components

• ABIT GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB at stock speeds (250/500)
• 256MB Samsung PC2700 run at strictest timings
• 120GB Western Digital 120JB 7200rpm hard drive with 8MB cache.
• Liteon 40x12x40 CDRW
• Pioneer DVR-104 DVD ReWriter
• Liteon 16x DVD
• Samcheer 420w PSU
• 21" Sony G500 FD monitor
• D-Link FE530TX NIC
• Lian-Li PC60 Aluminium Case

Software

• Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
• Detonator XP 29.42 drivers
• Sisoft Sandra 2002 Professional
• Pifast v41
• Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end
• XMpeg 4.2A DVD encoding, DivX 5.02 CODEC
• 3DMark 2001SE
• Comanche 4 benchmark
• Serious Sam 2 Demo
• Quake 3 v1.30

My benchmarking system is in a state of flux at this very moment. I'm changing certain components to more accurately reflect today's PCs. I've also changed video card drivers since my last review, too.

With that in mind, I'm only benchmarking the BD7II-RAID against itself when run at 2266MHz and either memory at 133MHz or 178MHz. I'll be adding results from other motherboards in the near future.

All benchmarks were conducted at 1024x768x32 100Hz with vertical sync' disabled. Benchmarks were run 3 times consecutively, an average score was taken. The system was configured for maximum performance. Considering that the majority of motherboards perform to within a percentage point or two of each other, the results obtained here can act as a broad representation of the performance expected from i845E-based motherboards when coupled with a 2.26GHz processor and GeForce4 Ti 4200.

Enough talk, on to the numbers.