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
