Written By:
Date Posted: July 15, 2002

Benchmarks and Stability Testing

Test Sytem
MSI K7D Master-L mainboard
2x AMD Athlon XP 1700+ processors
2x256 Meg Kingmax PC2100 non-registered DDR RAM
MSI GeForce 4MX 420
30 GIG ATA100 7200 RPM Maxtor hard drive
Mitsumi 48x CD-Rom drive
Sony 12x CD-RW
nVidia Detonators 28.32

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

Comparison benchmarks will be carried over from the last K7D Master review.

People who intend on building an SMP system want it to be extremely stable system and perform as well. Typically you have to sacrifice stability for performance and vice versa, but the K7D Master-L makes no compromises. Let's take a look at CPU performance under SiSoft Sandra.

SiSoft Sandra CPU (Dual)

SiSoft Sandra MMX (Dual)

The graph shows the K7D-L Master to be a very strong performer. The K7D Master-L actually manages to best the reference 1700+ scores. The K7D Master trailed the SiSoft reference scores in our previous test. Why don't we take a look at single CPU scores next?

SiSoft Sandra CPU

SiSoft Sandra MMX

The single processor test has a single XP 1700+ processor in the K7D Master-L beating the reference scores by a few points yet again. Now let's take a look at some memory scores.

The memory was tested at 133 MHz with timings set by the SPD on the memory modules. Two KingMax PC2100 modules were used.

Stress Test

SiSoft Sandra has the ability to stress test your processors memory and hard drives, making it the ideal stability tester. The K7D Master-L ran Sandra for 48 hours straight with both processors at 100% usage at High stress setting. After 48 hours I stopped Sandra and decided to play a few games and surf the net. The system was very stable and never stuttered, despite being under a full stress attack for the past 48 hours.

The K7D Master-L not only performs quite nicely, it provides unmatched stability as well.

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