The Asus P4PE And Intel D845GEBV2 Motherboards
Intel's  i845PE and i845GE Chipsets Hit The Ground Running With DDR

By, Dave Altavilla
October 7,  2002

We'll start digging in here with a light duty dose of Sandra testing and then, as an oh-so enthusiastic TV Chef would say, "kick it up a notch" with a little bit of overclocking.

Test Systems All Intel

 
Iwill P4R533-N Motherboard
512MB of PC1066 RDRAM

ASUS P4PE - i845PE Motherboard

512MB PC3200 Corsair CAS2 DDR DRAM
 

Intel D845GEBV2 - i845GE Motherboard
512MB PC3200 Corsair CAS2 DDR DRAM

ASUS P4S8X - SiS648 Motherboard

512MB PC3200 Corsair CAS2 DDR DRAM  

Common Hardware and Software:

Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz

NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 (Drivers - v.40.41)

IBM 30GB ATA-100 7200RPM Hard Drive

On board sound

WinXP Professional w/ SP1

DirectX 8.1

Intel Chipset Drivers Version 4.04

DIVX 5.02b CODEC
 

SiSoft Sandra and Overclocking Tests Simple performance metrics

Asus' P4PE Sandra and Overclocking Testing
 

There goes Asus again, goosing up those bus frequencies just a tad, to gain the edge in the benchmarks.  As you can see, their board sets our 2.53GHz P4 to 2.57GHz, even though the FSB is set to 133MHz.  It actually sets the FSB to 135MHz, which is more indicative of PLL wander than anything else.  However, it's always interesting to us that Asus boards tend to "wander" on the high side of things.  In the memory test, you'll note that the i845PE driven Asus board sports PC800 rivaling performance. 

Finally, in our overclocking tests, the tweaked out Asus P4PE steps up with a full 400MHz overclock from default speed and a blistering 412MHz DDR DRAM speed, courtesy of our friends at Corsair.  At this speed the board was relatively stable with an Intel retail heat sink.    When we set the board to an even 400MHz DDR, things got rock solid, even with CAS2 timings.  CPU core voltage was set to a modest 1.75V and we tweaked the DDR voltage to 2.6V just for giggles.  This board was beginning to really shine for us at this point.  We're hoping the trend continues in heavy duty testing.

Intel's D845GEBV2 Sandra Testing

The Intel D845GEBV2 posted respectable performance but was obviously setup for iron clad stability rather than all out top end scores.  Intel produces the types of boards you would want powering your Web or Enterprise Server; stability comes first with performance a very close second.

Winstones and XMPEG Encoding