|
OVERCLOCKING:
We normally would
prefer to use an unlocked CPU for overclocking,
so that we could adjust the multiplier instead of
the bus speed, and therefore isolate a failed
overclock attempt to either the CPU or motherboard.
The Pentium 4 1.80a CPU I used, however, was a
retail version, so I had to settle for raising the
bus speeds only, which could cause other
components to interfere with the tests. I found
that I could get to 116MHz by stepping up 1MHz at
a time and testing the system using DFIs
Overclock Cruise software provided on the CD.
Once I started to go over this speed, the system
started behaving erratically and became unstable,
one time locking up Windows entirely. The end
result was that I had the CPU running at close to
2.1GHz (18 x 116MHz), a 16% increase in speed.
A Few Words About The Benchmarks:
To help explain the scores listed in the
following benchmarks, I felt it necessary to
explain how the system was setup before running the
benchmarks. On both the DFI NB-76EA and the
Transcend ABR4, I started off by setting the BIOS
to Load Optimized Defaults. The memory frequency
was manually set to 266MHz(DDR). 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" with both the
Windows Desktop Customize option and in the Video
drivers.
The Transcend ABR motherboard uses an i845D
chipset, and I had already installed Intel
Application Accelerator (hence the after IAA
scores) on it
before doing the benchmarks on that system. To
truly test the DFI NB-76EA (the purpose of this
review) I ran four different sets of numbers.
These being: a stock DFI board without any updates
or add-in video cards, the DFI board plus the same
GeForce 4 Ti 4600 used on the Transcend board, the same
setup after installing IAA, and then finally the
overclocked system. Why all the fuss? Well, the
onboard video is what Intel calls its Extreme
Graphics chipset, relating it to using a MX400
video card, and I wanted to see how it fared.
Next, DFI claims that by using IAA, the user can
expect to get 10-40% better performance from the
system. It didnt seem
fair to have IAA installed on one system and not
the other, and you may be interested in looking at
my findings.
 |
|
The Hot Hardware Test System |
|
Good
Stuff! |
|
DFI NB-76EA
(i845G) Motherboard
Transcend ABR4 (i845D) Motherboard
Raidmax 400W Power Supply Unit
Intel Pentium 4 1.80a (Northwood) CPU
256MB Corsair PC3000 DDR
Chaintech GeForce 4 Ti 4600
Western Digital ATA100 7200rpm 20GB HD
Creative Labs 52x CD-ROM
Windows XP Professional
Intel Application Accelerator v2.2
NVIDIA Detonator Drivers v28.32
|
 |
|
Performance Comparisons with SiSoft
SANDRA |
|
Time for
some numbers... |
|
|
SiSoft Sandra 2002 was
the first set of benchmarks I used, which compare
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 1.80GHz speed, and then at the overclocked
speed of 2.09GHz.
CPU
OC'd
M.M.
OC'd
The default scores are
right where we expect the Pentium 4 1.80a to fall.
Overclocked to 2.09GHz, we can see that it overtakes
the reference 2GHz P4 CPU, and rightfully so. This
gave us the highest scores in all but one of the
benchmarks.
H.D.
OC'd
The hard drive scores
were somewhat below the reference scores, but were
still decent.
MEM
OC'd
The memory scores at
default speeds were right in line with what would
be expected from the i845 equipped with PC2100 DDR
memory, almost identical to
the reference numbers. When overclocked, the DDR
memory almost
gives the RDRAM a run for its money. Also, keep in
mind these numbers
could have been even better had we opted to use
the Ultra memory timings in the BIOS.
This gives us a taste
of what the system can do, and how much we can get
from overclocking. If you ask me, getting the
performance of what would be a Pentium 4 2.1Ghz
out of a 1.8Ghz CPU is pretty nice, considering
the difference in price between the 1.80a and,
lets say, a 2.2GHz model is close to a hundred dollars.
|
|
|
Performance Comparisons with PC Mark
2002 |
|
CPU and
Memory Torture... |
|
Next up, we gave MadOnions PCMark 2002 a go.
PCMark 2002 performs a series of tasks such as
image compression, text searches, and audio
conversion to gives us three scores: CPU, Memory,
and Hard Disk Drive (HDD).
The DFI board held a
nice lead in all of the tests when compared to the
Transcend ABR4. It's stock score was 100 points
higher, which seemed to increase slightly after using
IAA, even though Intel's Application Accelerator
is technically is only a disk I/O "performance
enhancer. Overclocking gave us another 15% increase in
performance.
In the Memory Score,
we had a bit of a role reversal with the Transcend
board in the lead over the stock DFI. Installing
IAA to the DFI setup pushed the scores up and over
the Transcend. The middle score (DFI with the GF4)
seems to be an aberration, and I cant fully
explain why I got such a high score. Naturally it
should be better than the stock score since the
integrated video is using system memory, thereby
reducing bandwidth, but I couldnt figure out why
it was much higher than that with IAA. Once again
we see a nice increase when overclocking.
Following suit with
the last graph, the Transcend board edged out the
DFI NB76-EA until we installed IAA, after which it easily
over took it.
|
|
Time for The
Winstones
 |
|