The User Settings page is quite handy for those
of you who like to live on the edge. When overclocking, nothing
is really more frustrating than having to redo all your BIOS settings
whenever the CMOS is reset. You can store profiles here and after
a BIOS reset, you can reload your settings by coming to this page,
provided you save some valid settings. You will still need to
adjust system date and time manually though.
The Cell Menu page is the main area for all things
performance related. You have extensive FSB options, manual or
MSI's dynamic D.O.T. For those of you unfamiliar with this technology,
what it does is depending on your CPU and PCIE load, the board
will dynamically overclock the system to get the most out of it.
Options will range from 1% to 15%. Generally, even
at 15%, there should be no stability issues as the OC is conservative,
but this will all vary depending on the processor and cooling
you use.
Memory options will vary depending on the ram used.
You can choose to use the SPD settings or adjust the timings manually.
As usual, the lower the values, the faster the performance at
the expense of stability.
Test Setup
The MSI P7N SLI Platinum (labeled as MSI 750i in
the charts) will be equipped with an Intel E6750 clocked at 2.66GHz.
A Seagate Barracuda 1TB will handle the storage duties and a GeForce
8800GTX running ForceWare Release 169 for our video needs. Windows
Vista Ultimate is the OS of choice, fully patched up to the time
of testing.
The comparison motherboard will be the Gigabyte
P35-DS3R and MSI P35 Combo. Both boards will be configured with
Dominator DDR2, configured with each board's detected SPD settings
for testing.
The software used is as follows:
SiSoft
Sandra XII Lite - We ran the memory bandwidth benchmark.
PiFast
- A
good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast
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.
CDex
Audio Conversion Wav to MP3 - CDex v170b2 was used
to convert a 440.5MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times
are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.
TMPGEnc
2.54 - We used an Animatrix file, titled The
Second Renaissance Part 1, and a WAV created from VirtualDub.
The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file
with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower
is better.
DVD
Shrink - We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off
the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to
70%. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.
Photoshop
CS2 Driver Heaven Test - Photoshop is perhaps the defacto
standard when it comes to photo editing tools. Given that it is
so popular, we incorporated DriverHeaven's latest test into our
review process. Lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars @ 640x480 and Crysis
@ 800x600 at LQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the
video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed.
Higher scores are better. We used Guru3D's Crysis benchmark tool
and the Checkpoint
timedemo for ETQW.
All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average
scores being displayed. Any system tweaks and ram timings were
configured to the best possible for each platform. Despite the
slight differences between the motherboards, we matched the tweaks
as close as possible. The drivers otherwise were identical.
Sandra XII Memory
Both of the P35 boards are quicker than the MSI
750i. The benchmark is strictly synthetic though it does give
us a gauge to look back on for the rest of the benchmarks.
PiFast
Very close results here. Again, both of the P35
boards come out ahead. The Gigabyte P35 wins this benchmark by
about three quarters of a second over the MSI P7N.
CDeX
Like our PiFast test, the results are the same.
Gigabyte's P35 leads the pack, one second faster than the MSI
P35 Combo and three seconds faster than the MSI P7N.
NEXT
