BIOS Continued

Under the Frequency/Voltage control, we have access to many of the motherboard's CPU and system level tweaks. For overclockers, the options are plenty, but your actual experience will vary depending on the CPU you have. The HOST Frequency (FSB) ranges from 133 to 550. You can simply key in the desired FSB, though 550 is something you can pretty much forget about under most circumstances. Unless you have an engineering sample CPU, which is not something you can buy in OEM or retail, the Clock Ratio will be useless. However, if you're lucky enough to have one of these processors, like the FSB, you can key in the ratio you'd like between 12 to 21.

Depending on the ram you own, the DDR:CPU Ratio is something you're going to find quite handy. Say if you're running PC2100 (it would probably be a good time to consider an upgrade BTW :P), and your FSB is at 200, you can adjust the ratio to 1.33x. If you have PC4000, dialing in 2.50x will net the 250MHz memory speed while leaving your FSB at 200. You can also use the ratio to adjust the ram if you're overclocking the CPU as well to keep the ram within spec.

Of course, since AGP and PCI slots are picky about FSB speeds, the PX875P includes preset speeds for those peripherals. There isn't any 5/2, 4/3 type dividers here, and this method Albatron uses is much quicker than having to divide the numbers yourself.

For your voltages, this is one of the parts of the board I was not satisfied with. For your CPU, you have 0.1v increments over default to a maximum of 0.3v. For the AGP, you only have one option, which is default plus 0.1v. For your ram, it is also in 0.1v increments to a maximum of 0.3v over default. I would liked to have seen 0.025v and 0.5v options, as in some cases you do not need a full 0.1v. I also felt the ram options are a little low as some PC4000+ ram modules need 2.9v total to run properly.

The Watch Dog Timer is present on the PX875P Pro and for those of you who are unfamiliar with this, the Watch Dog auto-resets the system if there is an overclock configuration it can't handle. I've said it before, but this feature is a HUGE time-saver and it's something I wish more manufacturers would implement.

Test Setup

Albatron PX875P Pro: Intel 2.4C (12x200: 2.4GHz), 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC4000 Pro, AIW Radeon 9700 Pro, 120GB Seagate SATA 7200rpm, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 4.6.

ASUS P4C800-E: Intel 2.4C (12x200: 2.4GHz), 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC4000 Pro, HIS Radeon 9600 XT, 120GB Seagate SATA 7200rpm, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 4.6.

Test software will be:

Business Winstone 2004
Content Creation 2004


Unreal Tournament 2003
Quake 3: Arena

The comparison motherboard will be the ASUS P4C800-E, running an Athlon 64 at 10x200. Cooling for both Intel 875P motherboards was provided by the Swiftech MCX478-V. The Corsair modules will be run at PC3200 with 2.5-3-3-5 memory timings.

SiSoft Sandra 2004

Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds, using the 32-bit 2004 version.

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

	Whetstone FPU	Dhrystone ALU
Albatron PX875P Pro	5431	7609
ASUS P4C800-E	5218	7418

CPU Multimedia Benchmark

	Integer iSSE2	Floating-Point iSSE2
Albatron PX875P Pro	18767	27533
ASUS P4C800-E	17980	26278

Memory Benchmark

	Int Buffered iSSE2	Float Buffered iSSE2
Albatron PX875P Pro	4598	4586
ASUS P4C800-E	4581	4553

In our SiSoft tests, the Albatron PX875P Pro beats the ASUS P4C800-E in all three tests quite convincingly. The largest performance difference are in the CPU and MMX tests, with only a small difference in the memory tests.

ZD Business Winstone 2004

The ZD Winstone suite is a script that runs a series of actions and calculates a final score that measures a PC's overall performance.

	Score
Albatron PX875P Pro	21.5
ASUS P4C800-E	19.6

ZD Content Creation 2004

	Score
Albatron PX875P Pro	28.9
ASUS P4C800-E	27.2

In the ZD tests, the Albatron edges out the ASUS, more so in the Winstone benchmark than the Content Creation. Although the ZD benchmark uses actual retail applications, the test is still synthetic, so let's see how it fares in real world standalone applications.

PiFast

A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. 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.

	Time in Seconds (lower is better)
Albatron PX875P Pro	51.65
ASUS P4C800-E	53.67

Albatron continues its strong showing by another victory in PiFast. The PX875P Pro is a good two seconds than the P4C800-E in this test.

TMPGEnc 2.521

We used an Animatrix file, titled , and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

	Time in Minutes:Seconds (lower is better)
Albatron PX875P Pro	7:01
ASUS P4C800-E	7:09

Both boards were fairly quick converting the file to MPEG-2, but the PX875P Pro was eight seconds quicker.

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