Overclocking
ECS isn't known as a company who makes highly overclockable motherboards. So how overclockable is this motherboard?
Even with water cooling this motherboard can't get any higher than that of the Albatron reviewed previously, in fact its less overclockable, only reaching up to 231MHz and it doesn't even need any voltage increase, though increasing voltages doesn't help. Overall overclocking isn't this systems strong point but it does overclock.
System Setup
| CPU: |
Intel PIV 2.8E 775LGA (@2.8 & 3.23GHz) |
| Motherboard: |
ECS 915P-A
|
Albatron PX915G Pro |
| Memory: |
1GB Corsair XMS TwinX PC4000 Kit (2*512MB) |
| Memory Speed |
3-4-4-7 |
| Hard Drives (Master) : |
80GB Western Digital 7200RPM SE 8MB Buffer
|
| Video Card: |
Asus Extreme AX800XL-2DTV |
| Operating System: |
Windows XP Pro SP2 Direct X 9c |
| Drivers: |
Catalyst 4.7 |
| Cooler: |
Swiftech H20-120 REV. 3 Liquid Kit |
| Case: |
CoolerGuys Windtunnel IV |
| Power Supply: |
RaidMax 400Watt Power Supply |
| Direct X Benchmarks: |
Unreal Tournament 2004 (CPU timedemo) |
|
Half Life 2 - Anandtech Canals Demo |
| Other Benchmarks |
VirtualDub 1.6.4 |
DivX 5.21 |
|
TMPGEnc Plus 2.59.47.155 |
Sysmark 2004 |
|
PC Winstone |
XMPEG 5.03 |
The Unreal Tournament and Half Life 2 demos were run at two resolutions, 640*480 and 1024*768. The lower resolution is at the lowest quality settings available, while the higher resolution test is run with the highest quality settings enabled. As tested with these two games is with sound disabled and enabled, and by disabled the sound card was disabled at the hardware level (thus the BIOS menu differences).
All the tests were run three times, with the closest results being used. The video file used is a 8555 frame VOB file from the original "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" DVD. For the TMPGEnc and VirtualDub tests we used a AVI encoded with HuffYUV, and in the case of the TMPGEnc tests the audio was also encoded. The XMPEG test used the original VOB file previously discussed. So lets see what the results are be looking at how this system performs.
Video Tests
Unreal Tournament 2004 is a game that isn't completely video card intensive anymore, but still has the ability to provide good graphics while providing 3D sound and good CPU usage. Lets see how the ECS board performs here.
First taking a look at this test as a CPU test what can we see? The two motherboards are within 1 or 2% of each other, making both boards perform basically the same. Overclocking the board, provides a 16% increase,, which is the same as the increase in the clock speed/FSB of the system. Moving on to this as a sound test, we see there are differences between the two motherboards. The ECS boards' C-Media sound cards is more efficient than the Realtek sound card from the Albatron board, in fact it is about 10fps faster at these settings.
Here at a resolution that more people play at the results stay the same. By enabling the sound the ECS board only loses 17% of its frame rate, while the Albatron lost 22% of its frame rate. Overclocking again adds 15% to the average frame rate, making this game basically CPU limited at these two settings. What about a newer game, Half Life 2?
NEXT
