System Setup, notes, issues, stability
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.- Intel Pentium 4 2800MHz S478 Northwood CPU
- ABIT IT7-MAX2 i845E run in both DDR266 and unsupported DDR356 modes (A4 BIOS)
- ABIT IT7-MAX i845E run in DDR356 mode (A4 BIOS)
- MSI i845E BLR run in DDR266 mode
- Shuttle AS45GTR SiS648 in supported DDR333 mode.
Common components
- Leadtek GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB at stock speeds (300/648)
- 256MB Corsair XMS3200 C2 run at 2-5-2-2 at DDR266, DDR333, and DDR356 modes
- 40GB Maxtor D740L ATA133 Hard Drive.
- Liteon 16x DVD
- Samcheer 420w PSU
- 21" Sony G500 FD monitor
- Thermaltake S478 cooler
Software
- Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
- Intel 4.00.109 chipset drivers
- Intel application accelerator drivers
- Detonator XP 40.41 drivers
- Sisoft Sandra 2002 Professional SP2
- Pifast v41
- Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end
- Virtual Dub 1.4.10 DVD encoding, Diva 4.12 CODEC
- 3DMark 2001SE
- Comanche 4 benchmark
- Serious Sam 2 Demo
Notes
I'm running the IT7-MAX2 in both its supported 133MHz memory (DDR266) and unsupported, but offered, 178MHz memory option using the 3:4 CPU:DRAM option (DDR356). Having a processor as fast as a 2.8GHz P4 means that fast system RAM is more imperative than ever. You really need to be able to get information to the CPU quickly.
I'll be comparing it to its predecessor, the IT7-MAX, MSI's own i845E motherboard in the form of the i845 BLR, and Shuttle's SiS648-equipped AS45GTR. I've also changed my IT7's BIOS since the last review, along with a change of video card drivers, so results will not be directly comparable.
Stability
Stability was a non-issue once again. I left it running SETI for 24 hours using the strictest memory timings and increased CPU voltage. No untoward incidents occurred in that time. I found no compatibility issues either after having tried a number of different modules, video cards, and PCI cards.
Issues
I had a strange experience whereby the DDR voltage would sometimes drop to extremely low levels on bootup. This happened a number of times initially, but seems to have generally righted itself. The voltage would be around 0.3v lower than specified in BIOS. I've never seen this behaviour before, and am at a loss to explain how and why it occurred. Other than that, the IT7-MAX2 was flawless during testing.
At times, it would sometimes take a number of seconds to kick into action once the power button was depressed. It would always boot, but would lie idle for, say, 10 seconds. This seems to be localised to this particular sample motherboard. There have been no reports of other MAX2s exhibiting this behaviour.
I also had a problem initialising the S-ATA ports, although this may well be down to personal user error.
Overclocking
The fact that you can lock your sensitive PCI and AGP busses is a definite plus when it comes to overclocking. As you may know, you can only raise your P4 processor's speed by raising the FSB. With that in mind, I installed my highly overclockable P4 2.26GHz processor, raised the Vcore to 1.8v via the use of a solderless volt-mod, and began testing at 10FSB increments. I managed to arrive at 185FSB, limited only by my processor.
Pretty impressive showing.
On to the benchmarks.
