The MSI GNB Max-FISR Motherboard
Intel's Granite Bay With Dual Channel DDR and AGP8X

By, Dave Altavilla
December 8, 2002

Granite Bay ID: We might as well take a quick look at what CPUID has to say about Intel's new Granite Bay, or E7205 chipset, as it is otherwise known.  "Do we have AGP8X working?", was the first question we asked ourselves.  Let's have a look. CLICK IMAGE FOR FULL VIEW   Let's see now, AGP8X is on, as well as Fast Writes and Side Band Addressing.  As you can also see, CPUID is claiming that this motherboard supports the AGP 3.0 specification and indeed has enabled that as well.  CPUID cannot however, ID the new Granite Bay chipset and lists it as "$Intel Chipset".  Wonder if that dollar sign means anything? The Hot Hardware Test Systems An Intel Arsenal     TEST BOARDS: MSI GNB Max_FISR (E7205 - Granite Bay) Asus P4PE (i845E) Intel DM850EMVR (i850E)   COMMON HARDWARE:   Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU (533MHz FSB) 512MB Kingston HyperX PC3500 DDR DRAM 512MB Samsung PC1066 RDRAM ATi Radeon 9700 Pro On-board AC'97 audio IBM ATA100 7200rpm 30GB Hard Drive Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 Intel Chipset Drivers v 4.10.1012 Intel Application Accelerator v2.2.2 ATi Catalyst Drivers v2.4   Before we dig into the testing, we want to call to your attention the DDR DRAM we used in our test system.  We've been working with Kingston memory around the HH Lab as of late and it is really a top notch product.  For this article, Kingston sent in some of their HyperX PC3500 product.  We didn't pull the heat spreaders off the modules, since time was of the essence in this article.  However, whatever Kingston uses under the hood for memory on this stuff, is really primo grade.     Two things of note here.  First, these are shots of their 512MB stick of PC3500 RAM.  However, we used two of their 256MB sticks for testing in the MSI Granite Bay board, since you need two modules in a system to enable Dual Channel DDR mode.  Also, this specific motherboard, due to it's lack of overclocking options, only allowed us to run the memory up to 290MHz DDR.  However, we have successfully run this memory at 433MHz CAS 2 with 2, 2, 5 settings, with full stability.  This is great DDR memory folks.  We stand behind it 100% and use it in many of our bench setups.     Performance with SiSoft SANDRA 2003 General system performance

First up on the list of testing software was SiSoft Sandra 2002 Professional.  It's a quick and easy way to compare results from any system against an internal database of similar systems. These benchmarks are theoretical scores, and can't necessarily be measured in real-world terms, but they do provide a good way to make comparisons amongst like components.  We ran a set of tests at both our CPU's default 2.8GHz, and then at the overclocked speed of 3.04GHz.  Here are the results:

The CPU scores are fairly standard issue for a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 setup.  In fact, they are within a couple of points of the reference 2.8GHz system.  Also, note that the GNB Max-FISR clocks the CPU relatively conservatively, with Sandra reporting 2.79GHz clock speed.  What is more impressive to note however, is that at 266MHz DDR, the MSI GNB Max-FISR with it's Dual Channel DDR Granite Bay chipset, passes by even the RIMM4200 PC1066 reference test system.  At overclocked speeds of 290MHz DDR, the GNB Max blows right by the PC1066 setup.  Nice... very nice.

Winstone Performance Business and Content Creation Testing

For some actual application benchmarks, we have eTesting Lab's Business and Content Creation Winstone.  These benchmarks run a series of Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Video and Photo  Editing apps etc, often mutli-tasking with several applications open at once.  They are indicative of real world desktop performance.

In both tests runs, the MSI GNB Max-FISR, with it's low latency Dual Channel DDR DRAM, powers past even the PC1066 i850E board, with relative ease.  The margin of victory is slight at only 3 to 5% but it is there none the less.  We were very surprised to see that the Granite Bay based GNB Max, bested the i850E in the Content Creation test.  Historically, we've seen PC1066 RDRAM configurations rule this test suite.