Test System Specs Steel and PCB, a beautiful thing...

• Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz. Processor and Pentium 4 1.5GHz. Processor

• Abit TH7II-RAID Pentium 4 Motherboard

• 256MB of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS DRDRAM

• nVidia GeForce3 AGP

• Thermaltake P4 Volcano 478 Cooler

• IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive

• Dual Quantum Fireball Plus AS40 7200 RPM ATA100 Drives (for RAID testing)

• WindowsME 

• Direct X 8.0 and nVidia reference drivers version 12.41

• Intel chipset drivers version 2.90

Overclocking With The TH7II-RAID As natural as breathing

To say the Abit TH7II-RAID is an "Overclocker's Dream" would be an understatement.  This board is a Power User and PC Enthusiast's nirvana, with more bells and whistles than you can shake a tube of Artic Silver at.  So, we took one standard Pentium 4 Socket 478 @ 1.5GHz., turned up the FSB and this is what we ended up with.  Click it...

Easy money, as the saying goes.  Our 1.5G Socket 478 P4 was able to overclock a full 225MHz. over stock core speed.  We feel there was still some headroom here but in the interest of completing our mission, we moved on to some testing.

Benchmarks With The TH7II-RAID The numbers don't lie

SiSoft's Sandra seems to have universal appeal within the enthusiast community, as a quick assessment of general performance of various subsystems within a PC.  Let's have a look

     CPU Test @ 1.8GHz.           Memory Test @ 1.8GHz.
                                              FSB 100MHz.
 

   Multimedia Test                RAID 0 Performance
 

Things are pretty straight forward here.  Solid performance all around and RAID 0 drive throughput, in the event you haven't been exposed to it, is unreal.  The RAID 0 performance here is a little light but we were not using our trusty IBM 7200 ATA100 drives.  Instead, we had to rely on two 40 Gig Quantum 7200 RPM ATA100 drives, which don't quite keep up with the GXP60 IBMs. 

Let's move out...

Here we pit the TH7II-RAID against its older Socket 423 brother, the TH7-RAID (version 1).  At the same clock speed, the TH7II-RAID does earn a small but clear advantage in these two desktop business and professional application benchmarks.  We'll chalk this up to slightly more aggressive timings we observed on the TH7II-RAID. 

Quake 3, MPEG2 Encoding Tests and The Rating