Soyo's P4I Fire Dragon & P4S Dragon Ultra
SiS 645 and i845D Compete - Soyo Style

By, Dave Altavilla
February 18, 2002

Here is our test setup configuration.

HotHardware Test System Pentium 4 Northwood and DDR

 
Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz. Northwood Processor

Motherboard and RAM Config #1:

Abit BD7-RAID - i845 DDR Chipset

256MB of Corsair PC2400 DDR SDRAM

Motherboard and RAM Config #2:

Soyo P4S Dragon Ultra - SiS645 DDR Chipset

256MB of Corsair PC2400 DDR SDRAM

Motherboard and RAM Config #3:

Soyo P4I Fire Dragon - i845 DDR Chipset

256MB of Corsair PC2400 DDR SDRAM
Other Hardware and Software:

IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive

Dual Maxtor D740X - ATA133 40Gig 7200 RPM Hard Drives (for RAID testing only on the Abit BD7-RAID)

Sound Blaster Live Value

Windows XP Professional

Direct X 8.1

GeForce3 Ti500 Graphics Card

nVidia Detonator 4 reference drivers version 21.85

Intel chipset drivers version 3.20
SiS645 AGP Driver 108d
 

Well now, this is always one of our most favorite parts of "proper" motherboard testing!  We know you come here to get the straight scoop too!  Frankly, both of these boards have the capabilities to be some of the best over-clocking Pentium 4 boards in the business.  However again, their BIOS quirks did hold them back ever so slightly from true greatness.  Let's have a look.

Overclocking The Dragons One breathes fire the other just plain cooks!

P4S Dragon Ultra Maximum Over-clock:

P4I Fire Dragon Maximum Over-clock:

Just a few quick notes here.  We won't dwell too much on these tests.  First, you have to understand that obviously, over-clocking is not an exact science.  Just because you see nice high clock speeds and scores here, doesn't mean you'll be able to hit these levels with your particular setup and CPU.  We used a Thermaltake P 4 Volcano cooler in our setup and cranked the voltage up to 1.825V on the P4S Dragon Ultra and up to 1.7V (as high as it would go without re-booting) on the P4I Fire Dragon.  We will say that the P4S Dragon Ultra was able to get us to a stable desktop and run the Sandra tests, at a speed no other motherboard to date has been able to hit with our stock 2.2G Pentium 4 Northwood.

Also of note is the fact that, over-clocked DDR333 SDRAM (at 378MHz CAS2.5 in the case of the P4S Dragon U board) does in fact offer higher bandwidth than the once almighty RDRAM at its stock speed.  Of course, if you over-clock RAMBUS beyond its PC800 settings, it will currently blow by even the fastest DDR DRAM scores.

Let's finish up this preliminary testing with the final stock speed Sandra scores.

SiSoftware Sandra Benchmarks Light duty and "synthetic" testing

The SiS645 chipset based P4S Dragon Ultra prevails once again, ever so slightly in all the tests, showing its muscle in memory bandwidth and overall performance versus the i845D.  Also, the integrated Highpoint HPT372 - ATA133 RAID Controller, that is common to both these boards, shows excellent but not awe inspiring performance, when coupled with a pair of Maxtor ATA133 7200RPM drives.  The RAID 0 score is only slightly better than the reference ATA100 RAID score in this test.  We'll blame this mainly on the fact that we are fairly certain that the reference system scores for the Sandra suite in the RAID test, are based on IBM ATA100 drives.  The Maxtor ATA133 units (the only ATA133 capable drives on the market at the time of this review) overall are slightly slower than IBM drives.  However their ATA133 interface does provide a little more bandwidth per pin.

Let's dig into more serious testing...

The Winstones