Overclocking
Something that people do is overclock their CPU, but this is sometimes dependent on the motherboard rather than on the motherboard. As we have seen just previously, that this motherboard provides a FSB of 266MHz as a maximum and a core voltage of 1.625 at most, not something that is really conducive to overclocking. But can this motherboard reach its limits of 266MHz as this is not out of reach of the PIV 2.4c which can reach 270-280MHz given the right motherboard.
As you can see, this motherboard doesn't overclock well at all. The FSB of 225MHz is very low, as I was expecting at least 250MHz out of any motherboard, since the processor can almost do that at stock voltages.
Test System
| CPU: |
Intel Pentium IV 2.4C - 200MHz FSB
|
| Motherboard: |
DFI Infinity 865PE
|
MSI 865PE Neo2
|
Asus P4R800-V |
Albatron PX865PE Lite |
| Memory: |
1GB Corsair XMS TwinX PC4000 Kit (2*512MB) |
| Memory Speed |
3-7-4-4 |
2.5-8-4-4 |
3-7-4-4 |
2.5-5-3-3 |
| Hard Drives : |
60GB Seagate ST, 40GB Seagate ST340016A, 40GB Maxtor 34098H4
|
| Video Card: |
ATi Radeon 9800XT |
| Operating System: |
Windows XP Pro SP1 Direct X 9 |
| Drivers: |
Catalyst 4.4 |
| Cooler: |
Vantec Thermalflow |
| 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 1.4.10 |
DivX 5.03 |
|
Truespace 4.2 |
Pi Fast 4.2 |
|
TMPGEnc Plus 2.59.47.155 |
Office Bench Online - HT Analysis |
|
XMPEG 5.01 |
|
The benchmarks were run as has been seen in previous reviews, but lets go over it again. For the Jedi Knight the test was run at 1024*768 with all the settings on high except for AA and ansiotropic filtering. Unreal Tournament 2003 was run using the HardOCP CPU test at 640*480 to cut the Radeon from causing a bottleneck in this case.
VirtualDub was run using a 8555 frame DVD file converted to HuffYUV at 720*480 and then encoded the DivX 5.03, without the audio being encoded. Truespace was run using the settings mentioned previously, and rendered to 1600*1200 to this. TMPGEnc was run using the same video as the VirtualDub test, though in this case the audio was also encoded. XMPEG was run from a VOB file from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, that was converted to an 8555 frame HuffYUV file
Pi Fast was run using 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory, just as we at VL have done previously. Our new benchmark Office Bench was run at a resolution of 1600*1200@32bpp, with the printer used being a HP Color Laserjet 5/5PS print to file, printer. Now lets look at the gaming benchmarks.
Gaming Tests
Games have always been something that has furthered the improvement of both video cards and CPU's. Since this motherboard is both a different chipset, and a different video card than normal, we will take a look at a couple of games to see the results. First we will look at a CPU bound game, that of Jedi Knight II, which, being based on the Quake III engine has plenty of memory bandwidth limitations assuming you have a fast enough video card.
We see that in this first CPU test that the Asus board performs slightly below that of the other two motherboards, by about 2-3%. This does show a little difference between between the motherboards, especially the different chipsets that we tested. Between the two 865PE chipsets we see almost no difference, about 0.66%, which is well within the margin of error. So it seems that the memory bandwidth is not really an issue with this game so far, how does UT2003 fair.
This test shows a larger variation between the motherboards. The Dual channel Asus motherboard seems to have a bit of a lower frame rate than the other two motherboards from about 3-7%. This ranges from 5fps to 2fps of loss from going to the ATi IGP from the 865PE motherboard. The two 865PE motherboards also have a fairly large difference, basically equal to that the DFI motherboard had with the Asus motherboard. Moving to single channel memory we see the Asus drop by about 14fps or about 22% of its already fairly low frame rate. Moving from motherboard limited frame rates lets look at the integrated video of the motherboard.
|
Video Card
|
Average Frame Rate |
| ATi Radeon 9800XT |
150.51 |
| ATi Radeon 9000 AiW Pro |
59.10 |
| Radeon 9100 IGP - DC |
28.78 |
| Radeon 9100 IGP - SC |
14.41 |
At 1024*768 we see a rather large variation in the results. The Radeon 9800XT is obviously on top compared to the other two cards as it has the raw power to dominate the tests. However looking at the other two results we see a more equal footing. The AiW Radeon 9000 Pro has a core clock of 275/270MHz so it is naturally faster than the integrated graphics, but only by 35%. Looking at the results we see that the AiW 9000 is twice as fast as the IGP with dual channel memory. Moving from dual-channel to single-channel means that you again lose half of your frame rate, moving down to an abysmal 14fps. While dual-channel is almost playable at about 30fps, single channel just isn't.
| Video Card |
Average Frame Rate |
| Radeon 9800XT |
133.90 |
| Radeon 9000 Pro AiW |
112.20 |
| Radeon 9100 IGP - DC |
30.40 |
| Radeon 9100 IGP - SC |
24.10 |
Now Serious Sam: Second Edition. This game offers very good quality graphics, as well as using OpenGL instead of DirectX. Looking at the results we can see a very large difference between the Radeon 9000 Pro AiW and the dual-channel IGP based video. The difference is from about 350% to 450% which turns into 80-90fps, just by going from the 9000 Pro to the 9100 IGP. The 9100 DC card gets you just over 30fps as an average, which may be playable to some people. Otherwise going from single-channel to dual-channel nets you a 26% improvement, which isn't quite what we saw in the UT2003 video card test. Now lets test the motherboard even more with some encoding and rendering tests.
