System setup, notes, issues
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)
- AMD Barton XP3200+ S462 CPU
- MSI 865PE Neo2 FIS2R Springdale
- Asus P4C800 Deluxe Canterwood
- Asus P4P800 Deluxe Springdale
- ABIT BH7 i845PE at 200FSB
- EPoX 8RDA3+ nForce2 Ultra 400
Common components
- ATi Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB (380/340)
- 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3500C2 run at SPD at DDR-400 for 865PE Neo2, P4P800, P4C800. Run at manually defined 2-6-2-2 for BH7, and 8RDA3+
- 41.2GB IBM 120GXP Hard Drive
- Liteon 16x DVD
- Samcheer 420w PSU
- Samsung 181T TFT monitor
- ThermalRight AX478 with 25cfm Cooler Master Rifle fan
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
Not so much an issue as an observation. It seems that a number of Canterwood and Springdale motherboards run best with SPD timings used. That wouldn't usually be the case. From our experience manually settings lower latencies is the normal method of fine-tuning a board for maximum performance. However, running a number of memory-intensive benchmarks unequivocally showed that SPD timings gave the best results. It then becomes a little difficult in comparing like for like. We hope that all boards apply the Corsair's correct SPD settings, and that they apply them equally.
The BIOS temperature reading was of a concern to us. This isn't that big an issue in the grand scheme of things. We hope that MSI resolve it with a BIOS release. Other than these two minor points the board was solid and dependable during testing at 200FSB. Overclocking the board's FSB can sometimes yield important information about just how well engineered it is. We were able to drop our 3.0 C ES' multiplier down to 12x and see just how high the board would go. Please remember that the FSB ceiling of a single sample isn't indicative of just how high every retail board will go. We managed to run the MSI 865PE Neo2 FIS2R at 255FSB without stability issues. This is a little way off the 300FSB we've previously seen on a Canterwood, but let's remember that the board's only requirement is to run perfectly at 200FSB, which it does.
Benchmarks will be conducted at 1024x768x32 unless otherwise stated. All benchmarks were run three times. If they produced similar results between runs, the final result was an average of these three runs. Also bear in mind that the MSI runs our 3.0GHz 800FSB CPU at 3014.28MHz. That's around 15MHz slower than the comparative Asus boards.
