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• EPoX 4G4A+, Intel i845G Chipset, Socket 478 Intel Pentium 4 DDR Motherboard
• DFI NB76-EC, Intel i845G Chipset, Socket 478 Intel Pentium 4 DDR Motherboard
• MSI 645E Max2 LRU, SiS645DX Chipset, Socket 478 Intel Pentium 4 DDR Motherboard
• Gigabyte GA-7VRXP, VIA KT333 Chipset, Socket A AMD DDR Motherboard
• SOYO KT333 DRAGON Ultra, VIA KT333 Chipset, Socket A AMD DDR Motherboard
• Intel Pentium 4 1.8A 'Northwood' @ 133MHz FSB (2.4GHz, 2.4B effective)
• AMD Athlon XP2200+ @ 133MHz FSB (1.8GHz)
• 2 x 256Mb Samsung PC2700 DDR Memory Modules (CAS2, 2-5-2)
• MSI G4Ti4400-VTD (MS-8871) GeForce4 Ti4400 128MB
• Adaptec 39160 PCI SCSI Dual Channel U160 controller
• 18.3GB Seagate Cheetah X15 U160 15,000rpm SCSI disk
• 2 x 73Gb Seagate Cheetah U160 10,000rpm SCSI disks
• Plextor 12/10/32S SCSI CDRW
• Pioneer 6x Slot-load SCSI DVD
• Creative Soundblaster Audigy Player Retail
• Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
• DetonatorXP 28.80 NVIDIA drivers
• Aquamark v2.3
• Quake3 v1.30
• 3DMark 2001 Professional Second Edition
• Serious Sam: The Second Encounter Demo
• Comanche 4 Demo Benchmark
• PiFast version 4.1, by Xavier Gourdon
• LAME v3.91 MMX and RazorLame 1.1.5 front end
Much like the DFI NB76 review, the onboard Intel Extreme graphics core was anything but. Performance is poor and it doesn't allow you to overclock the system. Since the core uses system memory as display memory, overclocking your memory bus is a distinct no no. So again, no integrated performance numbers since the core is suited only for business use at best.
As always, benchmarks were run 3 times and the middle of the 3 runs taken as the result. If any of the recorded results deviated by more than 5% up or down, the 3 results were discarded and run again until 3 consistent results were obtained. In the case of the OcUK SETI Benchmark, due to the time it takes and the need to leave the machine alone while running it for a fair result, it was only run once on each platform.
For the LAME MP3 encoding tests, CDex, a popular CD audio extraction tool, was used to extract Fat Boy Slim's album, Half Way Between The Gutter And The Stars into .WAV format. 11 resulting WAV tracks totalling some 689MB were encoded using the following LAME parameters from RazorLame 1.1.5: -b 320 -m j -h. That resulted in 320kb/sec CBR (constant bit rate) encodings into MP3 format and RazorLame was used to provide visual confirmation of the time taken to do the full encode.
The EPoX has some stiff competition in this review and it's up against 4 other systems including 2 other Pentium 4 based systems using the same 2.4B processor and 2 recent KT333 systems with an XP2200+ Thoroughbred CPU.
Let's have a look at a couple of the 3D based benchmarks we use here at Hexus, 3DMark 2001 SE and Quake3 v1.30.
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