The ASUS A7N266-E Motherboard Review
An All-In-One Powerhouse!

By, Jeff Bouton
March 6, 2002

HotHardware Test Systems Athlon All the Way!!

 

Benchmarking with Sisoft Sandra 2002 Pro Starting with the Synthetic...

As usual, we start off our benchmarking section of the review with the most popular synthetic benchmarking program out there - Sandra 2002 Pro.  This utility does a fine job at giving you a good idea how the system being tested performs when compared to a large internal database.  Below you will find the results of the test at both default and over clocked speeds.

CPU@1.53GHz.

CPU@1.65GHz.

At the default clock speed of the Athlon 1800+ processor, the Asus A7N266-E's performance was on-par with the reference systems for both CPU and Multimedia tests.  Once the system BUS was increased to yield an effective 1.65GHz. processor clock speed, the system closely rivaled or surpassed the performance of a Pentium 4 processor at 2GHz.

At the default BUS speed, the A7N266-E's memory performance was quite good, but not able to outshine that of the popular KT266A Chipset.  Once the BUS was set to 143MHz., the memory scores took the lead over the KT266A.  The hard drive performance with the nForce based board was very good, with little surprises.

 

Hard Drive - Single

Next, we'll stress the CPU with benchmarks that focus on the system's raw CPU ability.
 

Benchmarks and Comparisons The CPU Tests and 3DMark 2001 Scores...

Now that Sandra has given a us a clearer picture of how this motherboard should perform, we'll provide you with some performance scores to back it up.  First we ran Video 2000's MPEG-2 Encode test, which is a great benchmark that focuses solely on pure CPU processing.  For this test the scores were compared with the nForce Reference System.
 

MPEG-2 Encoding Performance with Video 2000:

As we can see, the performance of the Asus A7N266-E was virtually equal to that of the reference system.  Next, we ran the entire Video 2000 test to demonstrate the system's overall ability to process a variety of video-related functions. 

VIDEO 2000 - Digital Video Decode and Playback Performance:

Generally, a poor score is hardly ever seen anymore with Video 2000 when benching a video card, but when you realize this score was obtained running integrated video, it is far more impressive than it initially looks.  When the BigWop ran this test on the nForce Reference System, he recorded a score of 2293.  Once again, the Asus A7N266-E was right on target, coming within a few points of the reference system.  In our next test we ran the Quake 3 Demo 001 at 640x480x16 with the "fastest" setting to determine the boards CPU limit.  Running the test with these settings allowed us to focus on pure CPU performance since there is little to tax the video processor itself.  In this round we ran the test at both the default speed and overclocked.

Quake 3:

Here we see the A7N266-E put up a good score at the default setting.  Once we overclocked the board, the results increased 8%, which is in direct correlation to the percentage of GHz. the chip increased while overclocked. 

Next, we'll see how the system handles DirectX gaming with MadOnion's 3DMark2001.  In this test we not only compared the scores with the nForce reference model, but we tossed in some GeForce3 Ti500 scores to demonstrate how the system would perform with a higher-end graphics card.

MadOnion's 3DMark2001:

As far as on-board graphics goes, the A7N266-E's performance was virtually equal to the nForce reference system.  In fact, the results were extremely close. The Asus board even failed to run at 1600x1200 like the reference board.  Only after we installed the Ti500 did we see gains that exceeded the base system.  After running these tests I did get together with the BigWop to confirm that we had both systems set identically while testing.  If we had not, the on-board video scores would not be so similar.  The same settings and drivers were used with both tests, so we'll have to assume that something else is affecting the score, whether it be a difference in the Ti500s used or other system hardware.  Nonetheless, either score shows that these systems should run DirectX games with ease.  Now we'll move on to some OpenGL testing.

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