The Abit SD7-533 Motherboard With Crucial DDR PC2700 Memory
A SiS645 Pentium 4 board with Abit flare - DDR PC2700 Done Right With Crucial

By, Dave Altavilla
April 23, 2002

 
Please take note of our test system setup, so you can draw reference points on relative performance characteristics of all products.

HotHardware's Test System SiS' and Intel's best

Test-Bed:

Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz. Northwood Processor

Motherboard and RAM Config #1:
Abit TH7II-RAID Motherboard - i850 (No RAID used)

256MB of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS RDRAM

Motherboard and RAM Config #2:

Abit SD7-533 - SiS645
256MB of Crucial DDR PC2700 DRAM
Common Hardware and Software:

IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive

On board Integrated Sound 

Windows XP Professional

Direct X 8.1

GeForce3 Ti500 Graphics Card

nVidia Detonator 4 reference drivers version 27.50

Intel chipset drivers version 3.20
 

Overclocking The SD7-533 Abit and Asus Style

Although the SD7-533 is limited by its relatively low voltage adjustment options at this time, we were able to overclock our 2.2GHz P4 Northwood somewhat.  Let's have a look.

Please excuse our slightly funky color pallet in that screenshot.  We had a bit of technical difficulty for some reason on that one.  In any event, we were able to take the P4 2.2GHz about 335MHz higher, which is not too shabby at all.  We only wish we had another .2V or so, since 2.6+GHz has been reached with good stability, with the test chip we used here.

SiSoftware's Sandra Benchmarks Synthetic Benchmark Testing

Here,  we see very competitive performance across the board in both the Memory and CPU testing for the SiS645 based SD7-533.  What is impressive, is that we finally are able to see a DDR DRAM technology compete toe to toe with the massive memory bandwidth that the i850/RDRAM combination has been running with for so long.  The SiS645 chipset, coupled with good quality PC2700 DDR DRAM, is serious competition for the Intel i850 platform, which is considerably less cost competitive.  Furthermore, we see a glimpse of what is to come for the upcoming DDR400 standard, with our overclocked memory test at 2.5GHz CPU and 362MHz DDR speeds.  Here the SiS645 and PC2700 memory actually beats out the i850 at default speed.  However, we have also seen the i850 and PC1066 RDRAM  (1.06GHz and a 533MHz FSB) with massive bandwidth, that blows these numbers out of the water.

Finally, although the SiS645 based Abit SD7-533 performs admirably here versus its RDRAM based counterpart, we do see its Achilles heel, that being drive subsystem performance.  As you can see, the IBM ATA100 drive that we used in our test (the same model as the reference numbers listed actually) was only able to score just beneath the ATA100 reference score of 24000.  However, Sandra's drive test is not a very high end or thorough benchmark but rather a quick check on read and write performance.  So, take those numbers with a grain of salt.

Winstones and 3DMark 2001SE