BIOS
Now lets look at the BIOS of the system.
The tweaking that you can do in most BIOS's allows you to get
the most out of your system. So lets look at some screen
shots of the system.
The first two screens are the
main BIOS page, which shows you the first difference between
the 9XX series from other chipsets. This is shown by the
existence of only two IDE devices available, unlike the four
most motherboards have as standard. There is nothing that
is really different about this screen than your standard BIOS
otherwise. Next is the temperature monitoring page, which
shows you all the standard temperatures that you would expect
to see from a system. The only addition here is that there
is a Smart CPU FAN temperature option which dynamically controls
the CPU fan speed.
Now looking at two of the other
menus. First the CPU Frequency which allows you to change
the FSB along with other things. The PCI speed option
is self explanitory, as it allows you to lock the PCI bus to
a set speed (in the case of the menu 33MHz), or leave it to
auto. The PCI-E option is the same but has the options
for 100MHz or Auto, however with the BIOS revision I was using
it didn't seem to do anything. The voltage options for
DDR are from auto to + 0.4v, the NB voltage is from auto to
+0.3v, and the CPU voltage was from default to 1.6v.
The next menu was the Advanced chipset menu.
There is the standard DDR timing options, for our test RAM we
ran at the default settings. The other major options are
only available when there is no other video card, as this allows
you to choose the on chip video memory size and type. The
two sub menus of this menu are the PCI Express Root Port Function
and the Video Memory size options. The PCI-E menu allows
you to enable or disable the two PCI-E ports, and the compliancy
mode of the PCI-E ports (1.0 or 1.0a). The video memory
options are pretty varied. You have options from 64MB to
256MB for memory, but that can be from 1MB of statically assigned
memory to 128MB of it. The type of video usage is from pre-allocated
to fixed to DVMT, with combinations of them. For our tests
with the IGP we used 8MB of Pre-allocated memory and 120MB of
fixed memory.
Now onto the ITE RAID controller.
The main menu gives you your five different options, from auto
configuration to deleting the array or viewing the cards' config.
The first part of the auto configuration menu allows you to
pick the type of array you want to use. The second menu
allows you to assign the specfic drives to the array that you
made in the first page. The last picture is that of the
cards' configuration. This shows the array information
as well as the hard drives information. So lets now see
how well this system overclocked with the BIOS settings that
it has.
Overclocking
Overclocking is one portion of the total use
of the system that attracts many people. The BIOS of this
board is designed to get the most out of the processor thats put
in it, with a good range of CPU voltages and FSB frequency's.
So lets see how this new board and processor overclock.
We can see that the motherboard and CPU allowed
us to get to a FSB of 245MHz. The main limitor of the overclocking
seemed to be the PCI-E bus, as the system would post past 250MHz.
The PCI-E Lock did not seem to work in the BIOS, thus raising
the PCI-E bus speed as you increase the bus speed. We will
use this speed in our tests as the overclocking results.
Test System
| CPU: |
Intel Pentium IV 2.4C
|
Intel
PIV 2.8E 775LGA (@2.8 & 3.45GHz) |
| Motherboard: |
MSI 865PE Neo2
|
Albatron
PX915G Pro |
| Memory: |
1GB
Corsair XMS TwinX PC4000 Kit (2*512MB) |
| Memory
Speed |
3-4-4-7 |
| Hard
Drives (Master) : |
80GB Western Digital 7200RPM
SE 8MB Buffer
|
| Hard
Drive (NIC Test): |
2*Maxtor
80GB SATA HD RAID0 |
|
| Video
Card: |
ATi
Radeon 9800XT |
IGP |
Albatron
PCX5750 |
| Operating
System: |
Windows
XP Pro SP2 Direct X 9c |
| Drivers: |
Catalyst
4.7 |
Intel
6.14.10.3847 |
Forceware
61.77 |
| Cooler: |
Vantec
Thermalflow |
Stock
Intel LGA775 Heatsink |
| Case: |
CoolerGuys Windtunnel IV |
| Power
Supply: |
RaidMax
400Watt Power Supply |
| Direct
X Benchmarks: |
Unreal
Tournament 2003 (HardOCP software 2.1 - CPU Test) |
| OpenGL
Benchmarks: |
Jedi
Knight II Jedi Outcast (time demo) |
| Other
Benchmarks |
VirtualDub
1.5.10 |
DivX
5.20 |
|
Truespace
4.2 |
Sysmark
2004 |
|
TMPGEnc
Plus 2.59.47.155 |
XMPEG
5.03 |
The test systems and the benchmarks
used in the tests are slightly different. The PIV 2.4C
is only included in a couple of non-game related tests, basically
Truespace and TMPGEnc and are a reference only. Otherwise
the tests were run as they have in my previous motherboard reviews.
The Video tests used a 4:45 video file from the Hitch Hikers
Guide To the Galaxy DVD. The XMPEG test was run using
the VOB file, while the VirtualDub test and the TMPG test used
a HuffYUV encoded file.
All tests were run a minimum of three times,
with the middle value being used, as long as the results were
within 1% of each other. The SysMark tests were run three
times in succession as this program reboots after each section.
UT 2003 was run at 640*480 using the CPU test from HardOCP, and
JKII was run at 1024*768 with the highest quality settings, except
for AA and anisotropic filtering. So lets get on with the
tests.
Game Tests
UT2003 is a game that has
become something of a old hand in the testing system, like
JKII is in our other game test. Both games are now becoming
CPU limited many still play these games so they are still
a useful test, but only for CPU's that we can see.
First the results can be
split into three groups, the IGP results, the FX results and
the overclocking results. With the IGP enabled, moving
from single to dual channel memory makes quite a difference
about 7% is gained by moving the memory to a dual channel
configuration. This brings it close to the FX video
card in single channel mode, about 4% slower than the FX.
Moving to the non integrated video card, we don't see anywhere
near the improvement that we saw with the integrated video
card, only about a 2% improvement is seen here. Overclocking
the motherboard and also the PCI-E bus nets us a almost 18%
increase in frame rate over the stock clock test results.
However the clock speed goes up over 22% so the improvement
isn't as good as it could theoretically be. However
does a more memory bandwidth intensive game show more improvements
in these three sections, lets see.
Any Quake III based game
is a very good memory bandwidth testing game, and so we used
JKII for this as it is using a heavily modified Quake III
engine. But how does this motherboard do?
Again we see the three different
tiers of results. The integrated graphics supply over
60fps in either single or dual channel mode, moving from SC
to DC provides you with only a 4% increase. This is
quite different from the UT test which offered the 7% increase
in the same area. Moving to the FX series card we see
that the results are same as with UT2003 with a close to 4%
increase moving from SC to DC. Overclocking this system
offers a slight improvement than the UT tests 20% here compared
to 18% in the UT tests.
So far in these two tests
dual channel memory offers a 4% increase in performance, whether
its using the integrated card or the FX card. The only
difference was in the UT test but the difference there was
only 7% as well. Lets look at the results with video
applications.
NEXT
