ECS
is using the Phoenix Award BIOS, and while they have not been
known to be heavy on the overclocking options, their BIOS has
been pretty solid of late.
Your
intro screen into the BIOS is something most of us are familiar
with, nothing out of the ordinary here. Lets look into a couple
of menus to see if we can find anything of interest, shall we.
The
Advanced Menu is where we set some CPU basics as well as who
boots first etc. This is a screen most of us are familiar
with, nothing happening here as it relates to overclocking.
Lets move along...
This
we need to pay attention to as here is where we set the SATA
ports to act as basic IDE drives controllers or enable them
into a RAID function. Be careful of what you change here, as
ability to boot at all could lie in this screen alone.
Although
in the manual there was a couple of settings in the BIOS for
CPU Clock ratio (manipulating our multiplier) there was no
such option in the updated BIOS I installed. The DIMM/NB/CPU
Voltage Control allows us to manipulate those voltages, unfortunately,
by not very much. As you can see, we are only allowed to up
the VCore by a small amount. The only option for overclocking
is going to be under the CPU Host/SRC/PCI menu, unfortunately
we are extremely limited here. The stock settings for my E6400
is 266/100/33, allowing me to only chose 333/100/33 if I want
to do some overclocking. In my opinion, a much to large a
gag to make with the limited VCore ability.
Quick
Notes / Observations
Installation
was fairly easy, and the driver CD included installed all of
the necessary drivers with a single click. This is a nice change
from installing each driver you want installed and then waiting
several reboots later to use the system. Within the first screen
you could chose subsets of what was to be installed mind you,
it was automatic after that.
Using
the stock WinFlash (AwardFlash) from ECS to update the BIOS
within windows has an extreme DOS feel to it, like it does not
belong on a windows platform modifying your BIOS. It worked
fine mind you, but did not give me that warm and cozy a properly
made windows program would.
Overclocking
with the ECS P965T-A might be a challenge in that I have very
little room to manipulate the VCore or DIMM voltage. Also
noting that our next step is way to aggressive for said manipulations.
Several
attempts to overclock failed, I was not able to attain one fraction
of an overclock. I do not believe this is the limitation of
the CPU or chipset, as other readings on the web show both the
E6400 and the Intel 965 chipset have ample room to overclock
with. This is a pure limitation in the BIOS offering put forth
by ECS in this particular motherboard.
Test
System
ECS
P965T-A Motherboard, 2GB Patriot PC2-5300, Intel E6400 Core
2 Duo, HIS X1600Pro, Samsung 250GB, 8MB buffer, 7200 RPM, SATA-II
Drive, Windows XP SP2
Comparison
System
I
was going to compare the ECS P965T-A to an older review of an
Asus A8R32-Deluxe or even an MSI ***, unfortunately, all of
those had been tested with previous generations (can we say
previous already for the Pentium D and AMD 939's?) of CPU. When
I started compiling the numbers, I saw that it was in no way
a good comparison for this board as much as it was a absolute
overwhelming performance by the C2D processor.
With
this information I changed to a newly acquired Foxconn 975X7AB
utilizing the same processor. The systems Specs are: Foxconn
975X7AB Motherboard, 2GB Patriot PC2-5300, Intel E6400 Core
2 Duo, HIS X1600Pro, Samsung 250GB, 8MB buffer, 7200 RPM, SATA-II
Drive, Windows XP SP2
Testing
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 2007 - 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.
3DMark06
– Another standard benchmark suite that you, the reader,
can easily download and compare to give you an idea of where
your system stands in relation to the solutions we are testing.
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.
DVD
Shrink 3.2 - 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.
TMPGEnc
4.0 - 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.
Quake
4 – How good is the CPU / Video / Memory
communication? We strip down a demo of Q4 to 640x480 HQ and
make the processor do a lot more work then it normally has to.
Subsytem
Testing – We test the on-board sound performance
using RightMark3D
and the on-board NIC(s) using DUMeter.
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