ECS is using Phoenix AwardBIOS for the 945G-M3. The layout is going to be familiar to most so lets go over some of it shall we.
Your intro screen into the BIOS is something most of us are familiar with, nothing out of the ordinary here. We quickly move into the Standard CMOS menu to find the date, all of our drives and generic Video Settings.
The Advanced BIOS Menu really isn't all that advanced. In here we can setup basic functions like HD boot priority among boot functions. There is also a sub-menu for CPU Features, I thought this might be where we start getting advanced.
It turns out I was wrong, this is where you set the thermal protection properties and allow for Dual Core CPU's to act as individual CPU's (Virtualization Technology).
Under the Advanced Chipset Features menu we actually get to start to muck around with some of the timings for the memory subsystem. As you can see, I can fully manipulate the timings for the memory installed, however, there is no way within the BIOS to increase VMem. This severely limits the ability of this motherboard to overclock, not that it's main function is overclocking mind you.
PEG is the PCI-e Graphics card slot, this setting allows me to define which I am going to use, the on-board VGA or a video card in the PCIe slot. The default is Auto, which appears to be working fine so far.
The next interesting sub-menu in this BIOS is the Frequency/Voltage control menu. Unfortunately, they left out the “Voltage Control” portion of this menu, as I can only manipulate the Frequency. I have plenty of leeway here, from 200MHz to 510MHz. Unfortunately, without any VCore adjustment, I will probably never see 510MHz.
Quick Notes / Observations
While the integrated Intel video is nothing stellar, it does a nice job as a basic graphics solution to get you going. I tried to play some Quake 3 (a 7 year old game) and it was sporadic at best, I had better gaming experience with a P-III 700 and nVidia GeForce 256 card to be honest.
The silent design with integrated graphics makes this a strong contender for a SOHO Linux server, especially when you take into account that it comes with 4 SATA-II connections.
So what is Intel's Viiv™? From what Intel tells us its:
“Intel® Viiv™ technology-based PCs are designed for digital entertainment. They are powered by dual-core processors, giving you amazing performance to run today's demanding multimedia applications. Plus, they're complemented by entertainment services and applications verified to work with Intel Viiv technology “
Wikipedia states:
Specifically, Viiv is a particular combination of , mainboard , software, and . It is intended for primary use as an in-home media and desktop platform with the ability to operate as a normal PC or as a hardware media player/centre - running applications, playing DVDs, CDs, MP3, photographs and games as well as subscription based (partially DRM protected) content such as ILoveFilm, Napster and SKY.
So whats my take on it? I feel its just another propaganda being offered up by Intel when it was having trouble keeping up with AMD. That and to cow tail to the MIAA and RIAA in as simple a form as possible, not that that is good or bad. Viiv is also a standard, much like Centrino. Centrino was able to make a big push since it offered wireless internet, and therefore had something tangible to offer that everyone understood. Viiv does not and hasn't so far been pushed or marketed in the same way that Centrino has.
Testing
Test System: ECS 945G-M3(1.0b)Viiv™, 2GB (2x1GB in Dual DDR2 Mode) SuperTalent, Intel Pentium4 640 (3.2GHz Stock), Western Digital 250GB 8MB buffer 7200 RPM SATA-II Drive, Windows XP SP2
Comparison System: Asus P5WD2-E Premium Motherboard, 2GB (2x1GB in Dual DDR2 Mode) SuperTalent , Intel Pentium4 640 (3.2GHz Stock), HIS X850XT IceQ-Turbo, Western Digital 250GB 8MB buffer 7200 RPM SATA-II Drive, Windows XP SP2
Testing Suite
Time for the testing phase, all tests are run 3 times and results are then averaged (unless otherwise noted). VL’s testing suite includes the following:
SiSoft Sandra 2005 - Our standard synthetic benchmark suite, updated to version 2005. While it doesn't provide real-world information, it does give us a base for the rest of the tests.
SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation - A scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Like the SiSoft tests, higher numbers are better.
PiFast - A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.3, 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.
TMPGEnc 2.521 - We used an Animatrix file, titled , 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.
HD Tach – Similar to SiSoft in that it does not necessarily give us real world indication of performance but does allow for baseline testing and efficiency reports of CPU utilization at maximum hard drive transfer rates.
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