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HotHardware Test Systems |
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Intel All The Way |
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ABIT AI7 865PE Motherboard
ASUS P4P800 Deluxe 865PE Motherboard
BFG Asylum GeForce FX
5700 Ultra 128MB
Pentium 4-C 2.4GHz
512MB Kingston HyperX
PC3500 DDR-RAM
Western Digital 30GB
ATA-100 7200RPM Hard Drive
Creative 52X CD-ROM
Windows XP Pro SP-1
DirectX 9.0b
Detonator 52.16
Intel Chipset Drivers
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NOTE: When it came to
setting up the AI7 Deluxe for testing, we encountered a
few problems getting the test board to run.
Whether we used our Kingston HyperX or Corsair TwinX
memory, we could not run more than a single stick.
If we inserted the second stick into the second bank of
DIMM slots, the system would boot with a Checksum error,
prompting us to flash the BIOS. We did contact
ABIT regarding this and they suspected that the board
was defective. We were sent a second board and
much to our chagrin we continued to see similar
behavior, with a slight difference. This time
around we still saw this occur with the Kingston HyperX
memory when the second module was installed, however, we
got the same error continually with the Corsair TwinX
regardless if we had one or two sticks installed.
We flashed the board with the latest BIOS and the
Kingston HyperX stabilized somewhat, along with changing
the N/B Strap CPU As setting in the
SoftMenu from By CPU to PSB800.
No matter what we tried, the Corsair Memory would not
work. It seems that there are some issues to be
ironed out with certain memory modules that may be
addressed with a future BIOS update. We'll keep
you updated on this as more information becomes more
available. |
SiSoft Sandra Professional 4
To get things
started, we loaded SiSoft Sandra Professional 4 and
ran several of the more common modules, such as the CPU,
Multimedia, and Memory tests. First we ran each test
at the default 2.4GHz processor speed and then with the FSB
set for 265MHz.
CPU @
2.4GHz.
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Multimedia @ 2.4GHz.
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Memory @ 800MHz. Bus
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CPU @
3.18GHz.
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Multimedia @ 3.18GHz.
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Memory @ 1064MHz. Bus
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The most notable and obvious
effects of overclocking is found with the CPU test.
Our test bed went from average to top of the line, competing
on par with the reference Pentium 4-C running at 3.2GHz.
What was less obvious was the gains achieved with in memory
performance. We managed to top the memory output 1GB/s
with both the integer and floating point tests. This
was achieved with the memory divider set for 5:4.
All-in-all, the ABIT AI7 put up
a good showing with SiSoft Sandra Professional 4, showing it
has a lot of performance available at both stock and
overclocked speeds. Next we'll continue our assessment
with more testing in both synthetic and real world flavors.
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FutureMark's PCMark 2002 Pro |
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FutureMark's Finest |
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One of the more
popular all-in-one utilities for gauging a system's
performance is PCMark2002Pro. This application
performs a total of 62 tests to stress and benchmark a
system. When the tests are complete, a score is given
for the three major components of the system; CPU, Memory
and Hard Drive. We focused our attention on CPU and
Memory performance, comparing the results to an ASUS P4P800
Deluxe.
The CPU
performance of the two boards was extremely close with the
ABIT AI7 taking the lead by a few points. With the
memory performance the differences in results were more
noticeable. The ABIT AI7 did perform quite well,
posting a solid 8085, but it was over 1200 points short of
the ASUS comparison board.
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FutureMark's 3DMark03 & 3DMark 2001SE |
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FutureMark's Finest |
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Another couple
of tests we like to run with motherboard reviews are
3DMark2001SE and 3DMark03. With 3DMark03 we like to
focus on running the CPU 1 and 2 tests to reflect the
performance of the mainboard and processor.
Each board
posted good results with the ABIT AI7 falling to the ASUS
board by around 500 3DMarks in 3DMark2001SE. With
3DMark03 we saw the ABIT AI7 slip 2.7FPS.
Gaming, The Winstones and Final Words |