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.

	Frames per Second
IS7 - Pre Game Accelerator	247.62
IS7 - Street Racer	277.16
IS7 @ 3GHz	318.73
IC7 - Pre Game Accelerator	271.06
IC7 - Street Racer	281.85
IC7 @ 3GHz	328.88

No surprises here. The IC7 holds a slight lead over the IS7.

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.

	Frames per Second
IS7 - Pre Game Accelerator	266.4
IS7 - Street Racer	299.1
IS7 @ 3GHz	347.0
IC7 - Pre Game Accelerator	285.5
IC7 - Street Racer	304.2
IC7 @ 3GHz	355.2

Same trend as we've seen with UT2003.

Jedi Knight 2, 640x480

	Frames per Second
IS7 - Pre Game Accelerator	159.2
IS7 - Street Racer	178.1
IS7 @ 3GHz	202.8
IC7 - Pre Game Accelerator	174.5
IC7 - Street Racer	181.5
IC7 @ 3GHz	209.0

The IS7 makes a valiant effort in keeping up with the IC7, but it's clear that the Canterwood holds the fort. At Street Racer settings, the IS7 makes dramatic improvements, but so does the IC7 with the same settings enabled. Like the IC7, the IS7 shows excellent performance when overclocked, and it runs at these settings with total ease. Not bad for a chipset geared at the mainstream user.

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.

	CPU Test 1	CPU Test 2
IS7 - Pre Game Accelerator	60.1	10.1
IS7 - Street Racer	65.2	10.8
IS7 @ 3GHz	76.2	12.7
IC7 - Pre Game Accelerator	64.1	10.7
IC7 - Street Racer	66.2	10.9
IC7 @ 3GHz	78.1	12.9

As we've seen in the benchmarks today, similar performance between ABIT's implementation of the Springdale and Canterwood.

Subsystem Testing

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

Like the IC7's Realtek solution, CPU utilization was fairly high thoughout the 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

	Frames per Second
IS7 - Sound On	227.31
IS7 - Sound Off	247.62

It's plain to see that the CPU takes quite a hit when enabling the onboard sound. Keep in mind though that the settings used are not going to be ideal if eye candy is important to you. What happens when we up the resolution and detail level to settings most people would play with a similar setup?

UT 2003, Maximum Detail, 1280x1024 Resolution

	Frames per Second
IS7 - Sound On	92.198029
IS7 - Sound Off	92.191826

When it comes down to it, at high resolution and detail levels, the onboard sound's CPU utilization will not be a factor at all. For those of you who can spot a 0.006203FPS difference, my hats off to you, though eye doctors will wish you dead for your lack of business.

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.

Ed. Note: A reader pointed me in the where there seems to be some issues with the mic. I'm no singer, so I didn't test it, but it may be worth checking out. There is also some discussion about sound quality issues, but I have not experienced those myself.

Hard Drive Performance

I apologize for not having any SATA drives to properly test the SATA performance. Hopefully we'll remedy this situation in the near future.

ATA Performance (Regular IDE)

Performance is in line with the last Intel ICH5 we've tested. CPU utilization is 0.5% higher, but there are fewer spikes than the last time.

Network Performance

We used to test the networking speed, and Windows Task Manager for CPU usage. We copied a variety of install files, varying in size of 300kb to as much as 150MB per file from the IC7 machine, to our IS7 box.

Download speeds averaged about 8.76MB/sec, which is about the average with the type of files used in previous tests. CPU utilization averaged about 9%, with 7% being the low mark, and 11% being the high. If you recall in our IC7 review, I slammed the 3Com PCI NIC pretty hard for it's 30% utilization, so it was nice to get back to the <10% range.

 

Final Words

The IS7 Max II Advance is another winner from ABIT. Performance is outstanding, as is the overclocking ability and stability. It seemed to handle the overclocking a little better than the IC7, but we hit the familiar 300FSB ceiling again here. Still, I don't think anyone will complain about the OC headroom, as 100FSB over stock should be more than enough to cover what most Pentium 4 "C" CPU's are able to manage right now.

The feature set of the board is excellent. Everything an enthusiast needs is here, such as the SATA RAID, Gigabit LAN, Hyper-Threading support and dual Channel memory. The price is right also, although I should point out that this is a fully loaded IS7. There are several versions of the board, starting as low as for the IS7, to for the IS7 Max II Advance. Note that the IC7 used in comparison today is , but it lacks SATA RAID and Gigabit LAN. Add those to the IC7, and you have a . With the Game Accelerator BIOS, the various versions of the IS7 should perform identically, so it's up to you how much you want to spend.

Is there a downside to the IS7? Well, I'm not too wild about the location of the CMOS jumper, but that is a minor nuisance. The AGP slot location is a bit too close to the memory slots, and this is a problem I would hope ABIT, and most manufacturers, would address in their future boards. Basically, these are simply board layout issues, and the IS7's strengths greatly outweigh these annoyances.

Let us remind you one thing that was obvious today… make sure your . Not everyone will have an ABIT Canterwood to compare against, but it seems likely to me that an ABIT IS7 with the Game Accelerator BIOS will make a strong argument of considering a Springdale, specifically the IS7, rather than a Canterwood. Let me make it clear though that the IC7 is still the better performer, though it will also need the Game Accelerator update to maintain it's lead. I'll let the IS7's numbers speak for themselves, though, if the extra cash for the Canterwood is worth it.

Pros: Excellent performance, overclocking and stability. Low price point.

Cons: Sound eats into the CPU, and some annoying areas in layout design.

Bottom Line: The IS7 is simply the best overall package for the P4 we've tested in quite some time. It's extremely quick, and even when pushing our memory with the Street Racer settings, the board never hiccupped once. The BIOS is an enthusiast's dream, and considering the pricing, the IS7 will certainly not disappoint you.

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

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