Foxconn's 875A02-6EKRS Motherboard
A New Motherboard From a Not-So-Familiar Face

By: Jeff Bouton
April 5, 2004

HotHardware Test Systems Intel All The Way

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 at both stock and overclocked speeds.

CPU @ 2.4GHz.

Multimedia @ 2.4GHz.

Memory @ 200MHz.

 

CPU @ 2.79GHz.

Multimedia @ 2.79GHz.

Memory @ 233MHz.

At the default settings, the board's performance was in line with what we expected.  However, the memory scores were slightly lower than the similarly configured reference system.  Once we increased the system bus to 233MHz, we saw decent gains in CPU performance with memory scores jumping a healthy amount as well.  While it is difficult to draw any conclusions based on these results, the synthetic benchmark does give us a fair idea of what we can expect in the real world. 
 

Futuremark's PCMark 2004 Pro & 3DMark03 Futuremark's Latest

One of our stapled for testing motherboards is the relatively new PCMark04.  The beauty of this benchmark lies in its ability to assess all of the key aspects of a motherboard's performance, covering CPU, Memory, Hard Drive and Graphics subsystems.  When complete, the test issues a score for each subsystem as well as a total average score.

With each of the modules of PCMark04, the Foxconn board performed very close to the Albatron reference numbers.  We saw virtually identical Total scores as well as CPU results, while the Foxconn model returned stronger Memory and Hard drive results and weaker Graphics scores.  Once we overclocked the system, we saw a nice jump in overall performance, most notably with CPU and Memory scores.  The CPU test enjoyed a healthy 14% increase while the memory scores registered a 9% increase.

Another test we find useful in motherboard reviews is 3DMark03.  A good feature in 3DMark03 is that we can isolate the benchmark to focus solely on CPU performance.  This in turn allows us to easily compare CPU performance amongst various motherboards as well as demonstrate the benefits of overclocking the system.

Consistent with what we saw with PCMark04, the Foxconn board lagged slightly behind the comparison board, albeit by a very small margin.  When we increased the system bus to the peak 233MHz the system performance increased over 12%, a bit shy of the 16.25% increase in actual CPU speed.

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