|
• ABIT BG7, Intel i845G Chipset, Socket 478 Intel Pentium 4 DDR Motherboard
• 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
Hardware wise, this is the last Pentium 4 review featuring my venerable 1.8A which has found greener pastures. In its place from now on you'll see a 2.26B processor so a fond farewell to the 1.8A in this review.
Again, I'm ignoring the Intel Extreme graphics core on the GMCH for all the same reasons as previous reviews have stated. Being an enthusiasts board, I seriously doubt BG7 users will be using the onboard core for anything bar emergencies when upgrading to a new card as a go-between for a couple of days or when disaster strikes and your main card is out of action for whatever reasons.
The regular rules about the benchmarks apply. 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.
Like the EPoX review a few days ago, the ABIT is up against more systems than usual and the same applies here with the results from the EPoX added as well. So 3 i845G boards, a pair of KT333 AMD solutions and SiS645DX in the form of the MSI 654E Max2 LRU.
As usual 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.
|
