Unreal Tournament 2003

UT2K3 s a real system killer, and can bring many systems to its knees. We used the , which are excellent tools in testing various resolutions and detail levels. We selected the CPU test, which uses the dm-inferno map.

No surprises here.

Quake 3 Arena, 640x480

It's getting old, I know, but Quake 3 is still a decent benchmark for almost anything. For motherboards and CPUs, we run at the lowest settings and fire away.

Same trend as we've seen with UT2003.

Jedi Knight 2, 640x480

So far, with the gaming benchmarks, we're seeing that the IC7 is best paired with a Pentium 4 800FSB CPU. Using a 533FSB CPU, the performance does exceed that of the i845PE, but to be honest, you're not going to be getting your money's worth.

3D Mark 2003

We're still up in the air about 3D Mark 2003 here at VL. I'm not a big fan of the summarized scores, but there are a couple of areas of the benchmark I do find useful. Today, we'll be doing the CPU tests.

What you see above is a summary, but it doesn't really tell you anything. Let's take a look at individual tests.

Here we can see that the same trends we've seen with our real-world game benchmarks are mimicked here. The scores are a bit closer in the CPU tests #2, but the same scaling is present.

Subsystem Testing

The first thing we'll check is the audio. We downloaded and installed to test its CPU utilization.

CPU utilization was fairly high though DirectSound3D tests. CPU utilization never got to 10%, but it did average in the 5% - 7% range, which is a lot higher than the <2% averages we've seen with the nForce 2. It's not the end of the world, given that the slowest CPU you would ideally be using with the IC7 is a 2.4GHz "C", but we would have liked to have seen lower numbers. This is a synthetic benchmark though, and since I know all of you enjoy a game or two, let's see how the sound will affect UT 2003 performance.

The [H]ardocp Tool has an option to enable and disable sound during testing. Tests will be done with the same hardware configuration as the rest of the benchmarks, except we'll only be displaying the Pentium 4 2.4GHz "C" numbers.

UT 2003, Minimum Detail, 640x480 Resolution

Here we can see the IC7 loses quite a bit of performance with the onboard sound enabled. Before any of you start getting too alarmed, I seriously doubt many of you prefer to play at such low detail settings. Let's try something more realistic.

UT 2003, Maximum Detail, 1280x1024 Resolution

Here we can see that the sound, on or off, has little effect if you play at a more reasonable resolution. My take on this? Yes, CPU utilization is higher than I would like, but it should not affect gameplay much at all.

In terms of sound quality, I found gaming to be very acceptable, and ever since Scott posted in our forums how much he enjoyed Evanescence - Fallen, I've been listening to that quite a bit as well. The music is a mix of calm and fast paced rock, and the singer's haunting vocals played out quite well through my Logitech THX Z-560's.

Hard Drive Performance

I apologize for not having any SATA drives to properly test the SATA performance, but I will be using a Parallel-to-SATA adapter to at least give it a shot.

SATA Performance (with Parallel-to-SATA adapter)

ATA Performance (Regular IDE)

From what I can tell you, unless you have a SATA drive, you're probably better off just using a standard IDE connection. CPU usage is quite a bit lower, though so is the average read speed. Random Access Times are within our margin of error, but this is more a hard drive architecture measure.

Overclocking Results @ 3GHz

We weren't going to leave you guys hanging without any overclocking results, so with out 2.4C running at a healthy 3GHz (250FSB), at stock voltage and stock cooling, these results should be attainable by almost everyone. Hardware settings are identical to the previous benchmarks in this review.

CPU	MMX	Memory

Our SiSoft Sandra numbers were pretty impressive, but it was the real-world benchmarks that are eye openers.

TMPGEnc - Stock: 27 sec, OC: 22 sec

PiFast - Stock: 57.52 sec, OC: 47.3 sec

UT2003 - Stock: 271.06 fps, OC: 328.88 fps

Q3 - Stock: 285.5 fps, OC: 355.2 fps

JK2 - Stock: 174.5 fps, OC: 209.0 fps

Those are some serious numbers there, and keep in mind this was done with stock cooling. The IC7 was rock solid during the tests, and after a couple weeks, it's still running strong.

Final Words

Moral to the story? It's obvious overclocking will net some serious performance gains. What's great is that the IC7 and Pentium 4 2.4C handles it so well, and realistically, a 250FSB should be a slam dunk. Still, overclocking isn't everyone's bag (and why is that?), and even at stock speeds, we got some of the best performance we've seen out of an Intel platform around here at VL.

The ABIT IC7 doesn't have what I would call a feature-rich package. There's no hardware based RAID, and no Gigabit ethernet, let alone any ethernet. It's been awhile I've had to use a PCI based NIC, and I certainly don't miss the 30% CPU utilization of this 3Com 10/100 card. On the otherhand, if you wanted all the frills, pickup an ABIT IC7-G Max2 Advance, but get ready to shell out a couple C-Notes for that. Though it's missing a few hardware based features, it does offer quality sound, albeit with high CPU utilization. Other enhancements such as Hyper-Threading, 800FSB support, and Dual Channel DDR... it's all here.

We've already discussed the speed and overclocking, but how about stability? Like past ABIT boards we've worked with, this was a non-factor as the IC7 proved to be very tough to lockup. Even when we did push too far, a simple CMOS reset fixed things. What I did like was resetting the CMOS didn't mess with the system clock, though I did have to reset other areas.

Speaking of which, the BIOS, specifically the Softmenu, was a breeze to work with. I would have liked to have seen higher voltage options for DDR, you do get a fair amount of options to work with when overclocking. I do have some news though. ABIT has released a new BIOS, dubbed the Game Accelerator (actually, that's the name of the option in Advanced Chipset Features), that greatly improves performance. I got the BIOS update a little too late to include in this review, but I did run a few tests and I am quite impressed as I saw performance gains from 5% to 25% across our benchmarks. I'll be posting a follow up this week, so stay tuned.

Ed. Note:

If you've read a few ABIT IC7 and IS7 reviews the past few weeks, you'll probably know that the much cheaper Springdale based IS7 has been performing on par with the Canterwood based IS7. Considering the price difference between the two boards, the IS7 appears to be the smarter choice. How can that be, given that the Canterwood has Intel's Performance Acceleration Technology (PAT), but the Springdale does not? The answer can be found in the new "Game Accelerator" BIOS that ABIT released for the IS7 a few weeks ago.

I never did understand why such an optimization would be exclusive to a "mainstream" board, but late last week we got our hands on a BETA BIOS for the IC7 that contains the same optimizations as those found in the IS7.

What is the Game Accelerator?

It's called the Game Accelerator BIOS, but that isn't really accurate. The "Game Accelerator" is actually a feature found in the "Advanced Chipset Features". The rest of the BIOS is essentially unchanged otherwise. from ABIT's site:

"Users have a choice between "Auto", "Turbo", "Street racer" and "F1" so they can optimize their system performance according to their memory modules. The IC7-G will also come equipped with these new settings. With each setting, users can push their overall PC performance further and further. Those who select F1 in the BIOS settings are looking to get Formula 1 performance from their desktop PC, and so should be prepared to unleash raw computing power."

The way the optimizations work is exactly as described above. The Game Accelerator tweaks your memory, and as we already know, tweaked memory improves overall system performance. Basically, you'll want to run your CPU and memory synchronous with each other; i.e., 1:1. Depending on how solid your ram is, either you can the timings before hand, or set it to SPD. Afterwords, you set your ram to one of the four settings, Auto, Turbo, Street Racer or F1. I should point out that Street Racer and F1 may not work on all memory modules. I had a lot of difficulty getting our Corsair TWINX to behave at F1, and it only worked when I relaxed the timings to 2.5-3-3-7, which ended up performing close to 2-3-3-6 at Street Racer settings.

Test Setup

ABIT IC7 : Pentium 4 2.4C (12x200: 2.4GHz), 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, AiW ATi Radeon 9700 Pro, 80GB Western Digital, Windows XP SP1, ATi Catalyst 3.4

Test software will be:

AVI-to-MPG Encoding
CPU Tests
Unreal Tournament 2003
Quake 3: Arena
Jedi Knight 2

Pre-Game Accelerator (referred to as IC7-Pre-GA in the graphs) scores were compiled in our ABIT IC7 review, so if you wanted more info on that, as well as on the IC7 itself, feel free to check it out.

SiSoft CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

SiSoft CPU Multimedia Benchmark

There's very little change in the CPU based numbers. The new BIOS targets the memory though, so let's check those out.

SiSoft Memory Benchmark

Here the differences are a lot more dramatic. Typically, faster memory will affect overall system performance, so let's look at some application benchmarks.

PC Mark 2002

CPU scores are close again, but the differences in memory performance illustrate the improvements made by ABIT's engineers.

PiFast

We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

Lower is Better

Slight improvements in computation times. This reflects a similar trend we've seen with our memory reviews. As memory is tweaked, the time to compute decrease.

TMPGEnc MPEG Encoding

Video editing is a taxing chore, and we'll be testing the IC7 using TMPGEnc 2.512 to encode a 7.78MB, 1:30 movie trailer to a 23FPS MPG file. Note that lower scores are better.

Lower is Better

Much like PiFast, there isn't a huge difference but a second is a second.

Unreal Tournament 2003

Using the ...

Quake 3 Arena, 640x480

Jedi Knight 2, 640x480

In each case, there's an increase in performance as we switch between memory optimizations. The biggest winners are the Q3 engine games, but UT 2003 shows improvement as well.

3D Mark 2003 - Summary

3D Mark 2003 - CPU Tests

Nothing new here.

As we've seen, the Game Accelerator BIOS made a huge difference, for the better, in our benchmarks. I would imagine any quality sticks of ram can easily handle the Street Racer option, and for F1, you'll need something really good. Even if you don't own performance ram, the system ran fine at Turbo, using a pair of Crucial PC2700 sticks (though I was not able to run them at 400MHz). At Turbo settings, the performance was still better than Auto, so consider this a free performance boost.

CPU performance didn't really change dramatically, there's more to a fast system than dropping in a speedy CPU. Our BIOS was BETA, but the official version is . For you , the Game Accelerator BIOS is also official, and you should pick it up. We'll be presenting our IS7 review before the end of the month, and we'll be using this new BIOS.

Pros: Excellent performance, overclocking and stability. Low price for a Canterwood.

Cons: Sound eats into the CPU, no ethernet (hence the lower price).

Bottom Line: If you're planning on a P4 setup, a Canterwood is the way to go. It's still a bit pricey, but the ABIT IC7 is one of the lower priced boards available. If you can live with an add-on NIC, you should give this board serious consideration.

If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

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