Written By:
Date Posted: June 14 , 2002

Performance and Stability

Test System

MSI K7D Master mainboard
2x AMD Athlon XP 1700+ processors
2x256 Meg Kingmax PC2100 non-registered DDR RAM
MSI GeForce 4MX 420
10 GIG 7200 RPM Maxtor hard drive
Mitsumi 48x CD-Rom drive
Sony 12x CD-RW
nVidia Detonators 28.32
Windows XP Professional

Benchmark software

SiSoft Sandra 2002 Standard (CPU and Hard drive)
Prime 95 (Burn in)
Mad Onion 3D Mark 2001se (Direct 3D)
GL Excess (OpenGL)

As you can see, we intend on throwing a slew of benchmarks and torture tests at the K7D Master. I would like to thank and for each providing me with the Athlon XP 1700+ processors I needed to test this mainboard.

Lets take a look at the SiSoft Sandra benchmarks.

The graphs show the K7D Master to be a very strong performer when compared to reference scores from SiSoft. The slight advantage that the Reference 1700+ processor had over the K7D Master in the comparison is nothing to worry about, since it is within the margin of error. Why don't we take a look at single CPU scores next?

*Ed. Note: I'm aware the above graphs have 3 Dual 1700+ CPUs listed. This was an error on my part, and I'll be fixing that. The highest values are in fact, reference Dual 1800+ CPUs.

By comparing the single CPU scores between the reference platform and the K7D Master we can see that the K7D Master performs very nicely whether it is using one CPU or two.

Stability

What is the point of having a server if it is instable? I wanted to see how long this board would go without a crash and decided that a week long vacation would be the best time. Right before I left I decided to run Prime 95, a very processor intensive torture test. I left for vacation and when I came back, the test was still going, an obvious sign that this board can handle anything you throw at it. Just for kicks, I stopped Prime 95 and ran Hot CPU Tester just to see if closing and opening an application after running for so long would cause a crash. Hot CPU Tester opened without a glitch. The K7D has managed to turn out very good stability and performance on the CPU side of things so far. How about some memory scores?

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