System setup and notes
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.
- Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz HT S478 Northwood CPU
- Intel Pentium 4 2.26GHz S478 CPU for FSB testing
- MSI GNB MAX2 E7205 Granite Bay run in dual DDR266 mode
- ABIT IT7-MAX i845E run in official DDR266 mode (D7 BIOS supporting HT)
- ABIT BH7 i845PE run in official DDR333 mode
- SOYO SY-P4I i845PE run in official DDR333 mode
Common components
- ATi Radeon 9700 Pro (324/320) with Zalman heatpipe cooler
- 1024MB (2 x 512MB) TwinMOS 2700 run at 2-6-2-2 at DDR266 in dual DDR mode. 512MB of OCZ PC-2700 at DDR333 2-6-2-2 on i845PE motherboards. DDR266 for the MAX (i845E)
- 61.5GB IBM 120GXP Hard Drive.
- Liteon 16x DVD
- Samcheer 420w PSU
- Samsung 181T TFT monitor
- Cooler Master Fujiyama heatpipe cooler
Software
- Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
- DirectX9
- Intel 4.30.1006 chipset drivers
- Intel application accelerator drivers
- ATI CATALYST 3.1 drivers and control panel (6292s)
- Pifast v41 to 10m places
- Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end using U2's Pop album
- Virtual Dub 1.5.1 DVD encoding (P4 optimised), DivX 5.03 Pro CODEC
- Hexus SETI benchmark
- 3DMark 2001SE
- UT2003 Demo (Build 2206)
- Comanche 4 benchmark
- Serious Sam 2 Demo
- Quake 3 v1.30
Notes
The motherboard detected a 3.06GHz CPU without any trouble and booted first time. A fresh installation of Windows XP was used. Drivers were installed with Intel's favoured method of chipset, DirectX 9, application accelerator, and VGA. Installation completed without a hitch. The GNB MAX2 was installed in a standard ATX case without issue. Intel's Gigabit Ethernet had to be installed manually from the accompanying driver CD, as did USB2.0 and sound.
There had been a number of reports circulating around the web that Granite Bay motherboards had some kind of compatibility issue with the Radeon 9700 Pro video cards. As you can see from our specification list, a Radeon 9700 Pro was used. Throughout formal benchmarking and stress-testing, there were no anomalies, freezes or reboots. Indeed, to test the stability of the motherboard and video card, 10 entire loops of 3DMark 2001SE passed without issue.
Overclocking
I've been using a mobile Pentium 4 processor to test motherboards' highest stable FSB settings. Unfortunately, the MSI motherboard detected it as a 100FSB P4 (P4-Ms default to 12x100 in a desktop environment). In that case, MSI's BIOS allows a maximum FSB of only 132. Turning to a trusty 2.26GHz P4 that has seen 3GHz+ on air, the MSI managed to run smoothly at 180FSB in dual-channel mode. A SiSoft SANDRA shot should highlight this fact.
I must mention that we're CPU-limited here. The sample motherboard may well do 200+ FSB. Unfortunately the P4-M was of limited use in this setup. Intel's upcoming 200FSB dual-channel motherboards should get around 5GB/s on this benchmark.
Clock speeds
Benchmarks try to compare like for like. However, motherboards rarely operate at the exact frequencies as one another. In this little round-up, the four motherboards ran a stock 3.06GHz CPU at the following speeds.
3070.4MHz - ABIT BH7
3070.4MHz - ABIT IT7-MAX v1
3058.0MHz - SOYO SY-P4I
3058.0MHz - MSI GNB MAX2 Granite Bay
Please bear these in mind when comparing results.
