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Date Posted: June 14 , 2002

As you can see, the K7D Master managed to turn out some very impressive memory scores. While the scores are not up to Rambus speed, they do come out better than the reference AMD 760 scores, which shows me that the K7D Master is very efficient when it comes to using all of the memory bandwidth it can.

Next we will be using GL Excess to test OpenGL performance. OpenGL performance is dependent on the CPU, RAM and video card, so this is a great all around test. GL Excess does not run in SMP mode.

The fill rate test is mostly dependent on the video card. An average of 65 FPS is fairly decent. Although the K7T266 Pro2 managed better results, the K7D Master still had a strong showing here.

When the CPU is the determining factor, the K7D pulls off slightly better scores than the K7T266 Pro2. Both boards are so close in performance that saying any one board is a winner would be wrong. The K7D Master pulls of some great GL Excess scores, bottom line.

Now we move on to 3D Mark 2001se, which will test Direct3D performance. This is mostly a video card benchmark, although the faster your CPU and RAM, the higher your benchmark scores will be. All tests were run at default settings with anti-aliasing disabled.

Very respectable scores, especially when you consider that the graphics card we were using is a low-end GeForce 4MX 420. I would also like to pint out that 3D Mark 2001se does not take advantage of SMP, making these scores even more impressive. I was listening to MP3s, had a Sandra window open, running Hot CPU tester, surfing the internet, playing Pinball and doing other tasks. The CPU managed to stay between 1 and 5% usage while doing all of these things. The system constantly ran smooth no matter what I was doing or how much I was doing it.

Overall I was very impressed with the K7D Master's performance and stability. It didn't hiccup during any stress tests and it flew through our benchmarks without a problem. The K7D Master used the memory and AGP bandwidth in an extremely efficient manner. Despite what MSI may say, the K7D Master works fine with non-registered RAM and Athlon XP's running in SMP mode yielded terrific results. Obviously MSI takes pride in their engineering and with the K7D Master it really shows.

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