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TESTING METHODOLOGY:
To
help explain the scores I listed in the following
benchmarks, I felt it necessary to explain how a
system was setup before running the benchmarks. On
the Asus A7V333, I started off by optimizing the
BIOS settings to the most aggressive RAM settings
and system options. The memory frequency was
manually set to DDR333 by setting the CPU/Memory
ratio to 4:5.. I then installed a fresh copy of
Windows XP Professional, which has a number of
video features that make the interface more
visually pleasing, but at a cost of some
performance. On these test system we set the
visual quality to "best performance". Lastly, I
installed the VIA 4-in-1 Version 4.40 drivers.
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The Hot Hardware Test Systems |
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Lots of
Intel Hardware Here! |
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TEST SETUPS:
Asus A7V333 Motherboard
Raidmax 400W Power Supply Unit
AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPU
256MB Corsair PC3000 DDR
Chaintech Geforce 4 Ti 4600
2x Western Digital ATA/100 7200rpm 20GB (RAID
0)
Creative Labs 52x CD-ROM
Windows XP Professional
VIA 4-in-1 Drivers v4.40
NVIDIA Detonator Drivers v29.32
REFERENCE BOARDS:
Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra Motherboard
Abit KX7-333R Motherboard
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Performance Comparisons with SiSoft
SANDRA |
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Synthetic
Action |
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Sisoft
Sandra 2002 was the first set of benchmarks I
used, which compares the results against an
internal database of similar systems and drives.
These benchmarks are theoretical scores rather
than real-world, but provide a good way to make
comparisons amongst like components. I ran these
tests at both the default 1.53 GHz, and then at
the overclocked 1.64GHz.
Asus A7V333
Asus A7V333
1.53GHz
1.64GHz
The
numbers we got at the stock speed were right on
the money; they were just slightly above the
AthlonXP 1800 scores from the database. After
overclocking to 1.64GHz, we saw an expected
increase, putting it right behind the AthlonXP
2000.
Asus A7V333
Asus A7V333
1.53GHz
1.64GHz
These
two charts show us exactly the same results as the
previous test. At standard, default speeds, the
numbers are slightly over the reference values.
Overclocked, we got a nice increase, putting in
right behind the AthlonXP 2000.
Asus A7V333
Asus A7V333
1.53GHz
1.64GHz
The
memory bandwidth scores were slightly lower than
the reference numbers from the database, but not
enough to comment on. Note that the database
numbers came from PC2700 CAS 2.5, where I had mine
set to CAS 2.
Asus A7V333
The
hard drive score was fair, not fantastic, but in
line with a RAID 0 configuration using ATA 100
drives. It might have been interesting to have
used ATA 133 drives from Maxtor for comparison but
they were not available in the lab, in time for
this review.
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Performance Comparisons with PC Mark
2002 |
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CPU,
Memory and Hard Drive Testing |
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For
our next overall PC comparison, we chose
MadOnions PCMark 2002. PCMark 2002 performs a
series of CPU tasks such as image compression,
text searches, and audio conversion to give us
three scores: CPU, Memory, and Hard Disk Drive
(HDD). We then compared them to two other similar
systems, the Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra and the Abit
KX7-333R.
The
Asus A7V333 is winner of a close race here, just
90 points or so over the Abit KX7-333R. Since they
are all using the same CPU, this is what you would
expect to see.
Again,
the A7V333 came out on top, also by a hundred
points or so. The 250 point difference over the
Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra equates to an 8% increase
in memory bandwidth.
Ouch.
In this last test, the A7V333 got trounced, not
even breaking 1000. This could be a result of the
lite RAID bios that is provided on the board,
which does not allow for altering the stripe size
on the drives.
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Gaming & The Winstones
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