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 CPU,
mainboard chipset,
software, Digital
Rights Management and network
card. 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
PiFast
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 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.
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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