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 3.00GHz HT S478 Northwood CPU (800FSB)
- Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz HT S478 Northwood CPU (533FSB)
- AMD Barton XP3000+ S462 CPU
- ASUS P4P800 Deluxe Springdale
- ASUS P4C800 Deluxe Canterwood
- MSI GNB MAX2 'Granite Bay'
- ABIT BH7 i845PE at 200FSB
- ABIT NF7-S v1.1 (16 BIOS)
Common components
- ATi Radeon 9800 Pro (380/340)
- 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3500C2 run at 2-6-2-2 at DDR-400 for P4P800, P4C800, BH7, DDR-333 for NF7-S, and DDR-266 for GNB-MAX2-L
- 41.5GB 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 5.00.1012 chipset drivers
- NVIDIA nForce 2.03 drivers
- ATI CATALYST 3.2 drivers and control panel (6307s)
- Pifast v41 to 10m places
- Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end using U2's Pop album
- SiSoft SANDRA 2003 (9.43 release)
- Hexus SETI benchmark
- 3DMark 2001SE
- UT2003 Demo (Build 2206)
- Comanche 4 benchmark
- Serious Sam 2 Demo
- Quake 3 v1.30 HQ
Notes and issues
Much like the ASUS Canterwood board, the Springdale overclocks the FSB when running at stock. The operating speed of 3030MHz/202FSB/202 dual channel memory is faster than we'd like. There's not too much you can do about it though. Interestingly, during brief initial testing, setting the memory options to SPD paid huge performance dividends. You'll see exactly what kind in a moment. Setting the timings to 2-6-2-2, even at 203 - 205FSB, gave poorer performances all around. It seems as if the SPD settings, at 200FSB, are geared towards optimised performance.
The P4P800 suffered from no idiosyncrasies. It booted and operated flawlessly in each and every benchmark. The Springdale chipsets are reckoned to be the poorer cousin of the Canterwood. That didn't seem to be the case when this sample managed to overclock to 285FSB without any problem. A semi-unlocked Pentium 4 helped matters here. The board looks much like the Canterwood offering, it has a very similar BIOS and it overclocks to almost the same level. Not bad, eh ?.
The P4P800 will be compared directly to its Canterwood counterpart with both running in dual channel mode. Further, it will also be compared to an ABIT i845PE 200FSB board (single-channel memory) and to a dual channel Granite Bay board running at 3.06GHz P4. Lastly, the XP3000/nForce2 combination should give us a relatively complete summation of current motherboard performance.
