915P Chipset Roundup: ABIT AG8, ASUS P5GD2 Premium, and Foxconn 915A01-P
Test Setup & Overclocking Experiences
We would like to point out that for all testing in this review, we set timings on our DDR2 memory to 4,4,4,12. Even then, the ASUS board wouldn't work with the high-end Corsair modules we used. Consequently, we used more conservative timings to normalize for the slower Micron chips on our lower-end DDR2-533 modules that had to be substituted.
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SYSTEM 1: ASUS P5GD2 Premium Foxconn 915A01-P 2x512MB Micron DDR2-533 533MHz |
Benchmark Applications: PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004 PC Magazine Content Creation Winstone 2004 Cinebench 2003 Futuremark 3DMark03v.340 Futuremark PCMark04v.120 Windows Media Encoder 9 Crytek Far Cryv.1.1 Epic Unreal Tournament 2004 Id Doom 3 SiSoft Sandra 2004 |
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The ASUS P5GD2 Premium proved the most capable overclocker, hitting 250MHz with a 15x clock multiplier on our unlocked Pentium 4 (any higher than the 3.75GHz setting proved a bit flaky). The ABIT AG8 took a very close second-place finish with a 245MHz frontside bus using the same multiplier setting. We went ahead and left the Foxconn board at 17x to help compensate for its poor 210MHz frontside bus overclock, resulting in 3.57GHz.
ASUS P5GD2 Premium overclocking results:
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;)
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ABIT AG8 overclocking results:
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;)
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Foxconn 915A01-P overclocking results:
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;)
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In addition to the Sandra benchmarks, we also ran instances of Doom 3 to test for stability and performance. It comes as no surprise that at 1,024 x 768, the ASUS P5GD2 Premium took the top spot, scoring 82.8 frames per second. The ABIT AG8 took second with 80.7 frames per second, and the Foxconn board came in third place with 79 frames – just 2% slower than the ABIT board that yielded a much better overclocking experience.
