System setup and notes
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.
- AMD XP2400+ CPU @ default 2GHz (133FSB [15x] and 166FSB[12x])
- EPoX 8RDA+ nForce2 Motherboard (in dual DDR266 and single DDR333 memory modes)
- ABIT NF7-S nForce2 Motherboard (in dual DDR266 and single DDR333 modes)
- EPoX 8K9A2+ KT400 Motherboard (K9A22A25.BIN BIOS, in DDR266 mode)
- Taisol 760 cooler
- Intel 2.53GHz Northwood CPU
- Iwill P4HT-S i845PE motherboard (run in DDR333 mode)
- Thermaltake S478 cooler
Common components
- ATi Radeon 9700 Pro (324/320)
- 256MB Corsair XMS3200 C2 run at 2-5-2-2 at DDR266/DDR333 for all motherboards (another 256MB of Mushkin PC3200 at 2-5-2-2 for nForce2 dual-channel modes)
- 61.5GB IBM 120GXP Hard Drive.
- Liteon 16x DVD
- Samcheer 420w PSU
- Samsung 181T TFT monitor
Software
- Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
- NVIDIA nForce2 1.13 drivers
- VIA 4-in-1s, 4.43
- Intel 4.00.109 chipset drivers
- Intel application accelerator drivers
- Plutonium XP 8.1 Radeon Drivers (based on ATI CATALYST build 6166)
- 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
Because at the time of testing we were unable to unlock our CPU without modification, We'll be running a stock XP2400 (2GHz/133) at 133FSB in both dual-channel DDR266 and single-channel DDR333 memory modes. The CPU will remain constant at 133FSB. The reason for not running dual-channel DDR333 memory at 133FSB lies in the degradation of performance resulting from the increased latency in having asynchronous FSB and memory clocks.
I've sought to compare the EPoX nForce2's performance against ABIT's NF7-S nForce2 motherboard and EPoX's VIA KT400-based motherboard. The comparison EPoX 8K9A2+ will also be run at 133FSB. Lastly, a 2.53GHz P4 on top of an Iwill i845PE motherboard should show where we stand in a CPU comparative sense. Running our locked XP2400 with 2v+ gave us a top speed of 2355MHz / 157FSB. We've seen this particular motherboard being run at 200FSB+ by other users with unlocked processors.
