System Setup and benchmarking notes
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.- AMD Athlon XP2100 (1733MHz)MHz SoA CPU
- MSI KT3 Ultra2-BR Motherboard in DDR333 mode
- Taisol 760 with Thermaltake fan
- Intel Pentium4 2.26GHz Northwood B CPU
- ABIT BD7II-RAID i845E Motherboard (memory at 178MHz)
- Alpha 8942T with YSTech fan
Common components
- ABIT Geforce4 Ti 4200 clocked at stock speeds (250/500)
- 256MB Samsung PC2700 run at strictest timings (common for all both motherboards)
- 120GB Western Digital 120JB 7200rpm hard drive with 8MB cache.
- Liteon 40x12x40 CDRW
- Pioneer DVR-104 DVD ReWriter
- Samcheer 420w PSU
- 21" Sony G500 FD monitor
- D-Link FE530TX NIC
- Sonic Fury Soundcard
- 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 v3.92 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end
- 3DMark 2001SE
- Comanche 4 benchmark
- Serious Sam 2 Demo
- Quake 3 v1.30
Having not reviewed an AMD motherboard in some time, and the change in base PC specifications and drivers, I will be directly comparing the MSI KT3 Ultra2 and XP2100 with a similar Intel offering in the form of a 2.26GHz NW B processor on an ABIT BD7II motherboard. Motherboards based on one chipset usually differ in performance by only a few percent. What's more interesting, however, is how they stack up against a completely different platform.
The MSI KT3 Ultra2 will be running at 1733MHz / 133FSB with memory at 166MHz. The ABIT BD7 will be running at 2266MHz / 133FSB with memory at 178MHz.
All benchmarks were conducted at 1024x768x32 85Hz with vertical sync disabled. Benchmarks were run 3 times consecutively and an average score was taken. Both systems were configured for maximum performance.
