System Setup
Hardware
- Albatron K8X800 Pro II, Socket 754, VIA K8T800 Athlon 64
- ASUS K8V Deluxe, Socket 754, VIA K8T800, Athlon 64, 1002.007 BIOS
- ABIT IC7, Socket 478, Intel i875, Pentium 4, A18 BIOS
- Biostar K8VHA Pro, Socket 754, VIA K8T800 Athlon 64, 01/10/03 BIOS
- AMD Athlon 64 Model 3200+, 1MB L2, 10 x 200MHz
- Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz, 512KB L2, 16 x 200MHz
- 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3200LLPT, 2-2-2-6 (Albatron, ASUS K8V)
- 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3500C2, 2-2-2-6 (ABIT, Biostar)
- Western Digital WD360 Raptor, SATA, 36.2GB (Albatron, ASUS K8V)
- IBM 120GXP, PATA, 40GB (ABIT, Biostar)
- ATI Radeon 9800XT (412/730)
Software
- Windows XP Professional SP1
- ATI CATALYST 3.9 and Control Panel
- VIA Hyperion 4.49v chipset drivers (Albatron)
- VIA Hyperion 4.48v chipset drivers (ASUS K8V, Biostar)
- Intel 5.02.1002 chipset drivers (ABIT)
- HEXUS Pifast v41
- Simplisoft HDTach 2.61
- Kribi Bench 1.19
- Sciencemark 2.0
- 3DMark 2001SE v330
- Quake3 v1.30 HQ (four demo)
- Serious Sam 2 (OpenGL HQ, SDC demo)
- LAME 3.92MMX MP3 Encoding(192CBR, U2's Pop album)
- Realstorm Ray Tracing
- Comanche 4 Demo
- X2: The Threat - Rolling Demo
Notes
Just like the K8V, installing the OS on the K8X800 was a pain in the ass.Using a SATA disk on the VT8237 requires feeding XP Pro's installation routine with drivers for the controller, via floppy disk. The needed floppy disk didn't ship with the K8X800, meaning using a spare machine with a CD-ROM drive to create it manually. I have a spare machine for that, but first time users with no such luxury will be a little annoyed if using a SATA disk for OS install. Albatron better ship it with full retail bundles. It's a small point if your K8X800 comes in an OEM system, prebuilt, or you have a spare box, but ABIT manage to give you the floppy with KV8-MAX3, it should be present in all bundles that require it.
Interestingly, the Albatron driver CD came with Hyperion 4.45v, along with a brand new 4.49v set. The 4.49v gave good performance and stability during testing, so I've used them. They may account for a benchmarkable difference between the K8X800 Pro II and the K8V, which used 4.48v. I'll try and spot that whenever possible.
As always, benchmarks were run three times and the top and bottom results discarded, leaving the middle one for reporting.
At 10 x 200, the final clockspeed was 2014.2MHz. Slight bus overclocking, naughty Albatron. Look for it to be ever so slightly faster than the Albatron and Biostar on purely CPU bound tests. The K8V clock was 2002MHz, the Biostar clock was 1994.7MHz and the IC7 ran the 3.2 P4 at 3207.7MHz.
So, K8X800 Pro II vs. ASUS K8V vs. Biostar K8VHA Pro vs. ABIT IC7 (w/ 3.2GHz P4)
Just quickly before we move on, the HDTach graph for the Raptor, hooked up to SATA1 on the VT8237. Around 0.8MB/sec faster than the same controller on the K8V allowed, with 3% less than the 25% CPU usage that that board reported.
