The Integrated Peripherals page allows you to enable
or disable onboard features such as the Marvell drive controller,
LAN and audio. The various drive options such as JBOD, or various
levels of RAID for both controllers are handled in this section.
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.
When overclocking manually, MSI will allow the user
to make the appropriate modifications to system voltage.
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 X48 Platinum will be equipped with an Intel
E6750 clocked at 2.66GHz and Crucial's DDR3 Ballistix clocked
at 1333MHz. 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 MSI P35 Combo
configured with Ballistix DDR3.
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
In our first test, we can see the MSI X48 springing
away from the P35 board in this DDR3 synthetic test.
PiFast
Very close results here. We actually ran this four
times, and there was consistently less than a half second difference
between the two.
CDeX
Like our PiFast test, there's a very small margin
between the two boards.
NEXT
