SiSoft Sandra Memory

As expected, the 166 memory speed provides a nice boost over the 133 speeds. To be honest though, the improvements were not as high as I had hoped. You've probably have heard that the bottleneck for the KT333 is not the chipset itself, but rather, the CPU. The Athlon is still designed for the 266FSB, and it simply isn't optimized to feed the KT333 as it should. Running our memory at stock speeds netted similar, albeit slightly lower scores, as the Asus board. Overclocking our FSB to 143 (and also keeping the ram at 143) easily pushed our scores past the 166 ram speeds. Of course, the same overclock, while boosting the ram (HSCLK+33) netted the top score.

SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic

SiSoft Sandra CPU Multimedia

I think it's pretty obvious that performance is within a few percentage points of one another. The Asus KT266A board does score slightly better than the MSI KT3 Ultra, though not by much. Keep in mind that the Asus board does run slightly faster at stock speeds, due to it's BIOS settings, but we wanted to demonstrate how the boards compare to one another when you simply drop the CPU in, and set the FSB at 133 (266).

PC Mark 2002

A new release by , we've decided to incorporate PC Mark 2002 into our motherboard and CPU testing for future reviews. It provides tests that benchmarks a PC for typical SOHO use. Here's a snip from their site:

PCMark"2002 is a completely new, multipurpose benchmark, suited for benchmarking all kinds of PCs, from laptops to workstations, as well as across multiple Windows® operating systems. This easy-to-use benchmark makes professional strength benchmarking software available even to novice users. PCMark2002 consists of a series of tests that represent common tasks in home and office programs. PCMark2002 also covers many additional areas outside the scope of other MadOnion.com benchmarks.

Click for online browser

As with the SiSoft scores, the MSI falls a little behind the Asus, but you'll be hard pressed to notice it in real world use.

Previous Page - Overclocking & Test Setup

Next Page - More Benchmarks & Final Words