Overclocking
As we've covered earlier, overclocking is not going to be happening with the Ice Cube. I suppose those of you who own older Pentium 4 "B" 533FSB CPUs can try dropping them in and attempt an overclock by setting to 200FSB, but there are certainly no guarantees this will work.
Test Setup
FIC Ice Cube IC-VL67: Pentium 4 2.4C, 2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX PC4000, AIW Radeon 9600 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 3.9
ABIT IC7-MAX3: Pentium 4 2.4C, 2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX PC4000, AIW Radeon 9600 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 3.9
ABIT IS7-G: Pentium 4 2.4C, 2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX PC4000, AIW Radeon 9600 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 3.9
Quake 3: Arena
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
The Ice Cube will be going toe-to-toe with the Springdale based ABIT IS7-G motherboard in an i865 showdown, as well as a Canterwood based ABIT IC7-MAX3. I'm aware both the IC7 and the IS7 are full sized boards, but I'm sure some of you will want to see FIC's i865's performance against the Game Accelerator (GAT) enabled ABITs. The ABITs were configured to run in Street Racer mode.
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
Though the Canterwood takes the crown, the Ice Cube outperforms the IS7-G quite convincingly. This came as a surprise for me, but the results were repeatable, and the Ice Cube kept its lead.
CPU Multimedia Benchmark
Same results for the MMX tests, with the Ice Cube landing in the middle of the pact. Despite not having any free PAT with their i865 chipset implementation, FIC's performance is quite impressive.
Memory Benchmark
The GAT and PAT (in the case of the IC7) is obviously the difference maker here. The tweaks by ABIT are specifically geared towards memory enhancements, and it shows here.
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.
Lower is better
Very close results, and it seems like the GAT is not as much a factor as it was in the SiSoft Sandra tests. ABIT's i865 holds a one second lead over FIC's i865.
