Lastly we will look at the overall system test that is . This tests everything from 3D Studio Max 5.1, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Flash, Adobe Premiere, Photoshop and After Effects to Microsoft Office XP and Dragon Naturally Speaking 6. This covers most if not all of the programs that are used in most offices. The downside to this test is that it only spits out a number, not a breakdown in times that each section takes. So lets see the results here.
|
Test Name
|
PX915G-Pro - IGP - SC |
PX915G-Pro - FX - SC |
PX915G-Pro - IGP - DC |
PX915G-Pro - FX - OC |
PX915G-Pro - FX - DC |
| 3D Creation: |
175 |
179 |
175 |
218 |
179 |
| 2D Creation: |
180 |
186 |
188 |
255 |
191 |
| Web Publication: |
152 |
154 |
154 |
192 |
156 |
| Communication: |
121 |
125 |
117 |
137 |
126 |
| Document Creation: |
137 |
150 |
149 |
186 |
153 |
| Data Analysis: |
105 |
123 |
126 |
162 |
133 |
| Overall Internet Content Creation: |
169 |
173 |
172 |
221 |
175 |
| Overall Office Productivity: |
121 |
132 |
130 |
161 |
137 |
| SYSmark Score: |
145 |
152 |
151 |
191 |
156 |
So what do we see here? It seems that putting in a video card helps with many of the modules. The most glaring differences are in the Document Creation and Data Analysis portion of the tests, as the single channel integrated graphics solution performs 8% and 20% slower than its dual channel version. This helps bring down the Office score to 7% lower than the dual channel IGP test. Surprisingly 3D creation doesn't show much difference here, much like we saw with the Truespace test, as all results are within 2% of each other. Overall the DC FX test was just over 2% faster than the closest competitor with was the single channel version. Overclocking the system gives us the same increase in performance as we saw in the video encoding tests, with a 22% increase in score, with a larger increase coming in the Internet Content Creation portion of the test. Interesting results that show some differences between the test setups.
Lastly we will take a look at the networking performance of the two network cards that are on the board. Can they reach their expected bandwidths? The master computer was the 2.4GHz Northwood based system using the CSA Gigabit network card connecting to the test cards via Cat5e crossover cable. Lets see the results.
We can see that while the Marvell card is anywhere from about 2X to 2.5X as fast as the Via network card that only moves it from 5-8MB/s to13-15MB/s. This is no where near the maximum of the card, which is 125MB/s, in fact its about 10% of its maximum. The Via card is anywhere from 40% to 65% of its theoretical maximum bandwidth, much nicer than the Marvell card. Overall you could almost capture HuffYUV video over the network with the Marvell card without a drop in frames, or transfer your entire 10GB MP3 collection in just over 10 minutes.
Conclusion
Having looked at this new motherboard, based around Intels new socket and chipset, what can we conclude?
First looking at the packaging of the motherboard we see that for the most part Albatron has done well. The box is fairly eye catching and all the pieces are neatly arranged. What you get in the box is good too, as they supply you with enough connectors to fill all the USB and IDE ports on the board. However the lack of more than one included SATA cable is odd, especially as this board is designed with SATA as the primary hard drive connector. I especially liked the two quick install guides as for the first time user they definitely helped, especially installing the processor into the new socket.
The motherboard itself is another thing we looked at. The layout of the board is nice, with the new standard x16 slot and two x1 slots as well for future cards. All the IDE ports were arranged close to each other, near the bottom of the board, which is good for those that have drive bays that go all the way to the bottom of the case. I liked the fact that there were heatsinks on both the ICH and MCH, and that they do not have fans on them, which helps lower the sound level of the system. What I didn't like about the heatsinks is that they were connected using a thermal pad, instead of thermal paste.
The BIOS of this system is good with a decent amount of tweaking options, especially for the integrated video card and the obvious CPU overclocking features. This leads to the question of overclocking, which went better than some 9XX based motherboards have been doing, reaching 247MHz in our tests. However the fact that the PCI-E bus lock in the BIOS was not working helped to limit that speed, as this was more the limit of the PCI-E base FX 5750 than the motherboard or the CPU. This was using the latest BIOS at the time of testing R1.07b from 7/15/2004 even though a new version came out on the third of September 2004.
As for the test results we see that for most of the tests the results moving to dual channel memory gives you a 4% performance boost, regardless of which video card you use (IGP or FX5750). Moving from the IGP to the FX card doesn't really give much of a performance boost except in two of our tests where there was about a 4-5% performance boost. Overall the new board and processor helps move things slightly forward, but that is in comparison to our 400MHz slower system that was used as a comparison. Networking performance could have been better, with a PCI-E based network card, but is still good. Sound quality is pretty good, as music, Doom 3 (what little I 'played') was nicely done.
Price as always, helps one to decide if this board is well worth your money. This board comes in at about the same price as comparable 915G motherboards, and though I would have liked to see a DDR/DDR2 based board this will allow you to install quite a bit of memory if you want/have it. This is a good first board for the new socket, as you don't have to change everything at once.
Good Points
Bad Points
Final Words
This is a good board that has good performance and overclocks well, though it could do better if the PCI-E lock worked better. There were really no problems with this board, though there was nothing overly amazing, a good solid first LGA775 board.
If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.
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