System Setup and Notes
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.- Intel Pentium4 2800MHz S478 Northwood CPU
- SOYO P4X400 DRAGON ULTRA PLATINUM EDITION
- Gigabyte 8IHXP i850E (PC1066 16-bit RDRAM)
- MSI 648 MAX SiS648 motherboard run in DDR333 mode
Common components
- ATi Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB (324/620)
- 256MB Corsair XMS3200 C2 run at 2-5-2-2 at DDR333 mode for the P4X400 and for the 648 MAX
- 256MB PC1066 (16-bit) RAMBUS for the i850E
- WD 120GB 120JB hard drive.
- Samsung 181T TFT
- Alpha 8942 with 80mm Delta fan @ 7v for all the motherboards
Software
- Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
- Intel 4.00.109 chipset drivers
- Intel application accelerator drivers
- VIA 4.43 support pack
- Plutonium XP 8.1 Radeon Drivers (based on ATI CATALYST build 6166)
- Sisoft Sandra 2002 Professional SP2
- Pifast v41
- Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end using U2's Pop album
- Virtual Dub 1.4.10 DVD encoding, DivX 4.12 CODEC
- OcUK SETI benchmark
- 3DMark 2001SE
- UT2003 Demo
- Comanche 4 benchmark
- Serious Sam 2 Demo
- Quake 3 v1.30
Notes
The first disappointment came when I tested the DRAGON with reasonably strict timings and at DDR400. The performance took a serious nosedive in each and every benchmark, so much so that DDR266 was faster in most instances. For example, in Pifast, running at DDR333 was over 25% faster than at DDR400 (CAS2). It appears as if DDR400 performance is flaky at best. I'm a little miffed by this as the SiS648 chipset appears to do a reasonable job with DDR400 memory. With the extremely poor performance exhibited by DDR400 setting, and it being unsupported, I feel there is little need to include its benchmarks.
The P4X400 chipset boasts 8x AGP support. With a Radeon 9700 Pro recruited for graphics' duties, I was eager to find if it would work. There seems to be no method in BIOS to change various AGP speeds. Running 3DMark2001 SE showed the AGP speed to be 2x, although that's open to scrutiny.
Stability was excellent throughout testing. Leaving it to DivX or run SETI for hours resulted in total stability. Not a single crash in 12 hours+, even with strict memory timings and all 3 DIMM slots filled. Another point to remember when viewing benchmarks is that the VIA motherboard was running our test 2.8GHz CPU at 2792Mhz. The Gigabyte 8IHXP ran it at 2806MHz, and the MSI SiS648 was at 2812MHz. Please remember this when comparing results.
Overclocking isn't, and never has been, VIA's strongest suit with respect to P4 motherboards. Using a proven (180+ FSB) 2.26GHz Northwood B, I began experiencing difficulties at 148FSB with relaxed memory timings. If you're looking to push your processor to its limits, perhaps another chipset may be a better candidate ?.
Anyway, on to the benchmarks.
