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OVERCLOCKING:
Overclocking with the AT7 and IT7 MAX motherboards was
very easy, thanks to Abit's powerful Soft Menu III.
Both of these boards offer a very complete set of
overclocking options, that allow you to adjust the CPU
core, DDR and I/O voltages. Users can also alter
the FSB in 1MHz increments, and both boards offer an
assortment of AGP/PCI dividers, that make running
finicky PCI or AGP cards a bit out of spec. more of a
reality. The Athlon XP 2100+ we had installed on
the AT7 MAX was multiplier locked and hasn't been the
greatest overclocker. With that said, the AT7
was still able to run our CPU with a 142MHz FSB, for a
completely stable 1846MHz, a 133MHz increase. We
had to bump our Vcore voltage up to 1.85v to keep
things running properly at this speed though.
The IT7 MAX allowed us to take our 2.2GHz "Northwood"
all the way up to 2442MHz, utilizing an FSB of 111MHz
and a 1.7v core voltage. The maximum FSB we were
able to hit with this particular CPU in the past was
110MHz on some other motherboards. A difference
of 1MHz is not monumental, but nonetheless the IT7 was
able to take this particular CPU higher than it had
ever been before.
TESTING
METHODOLOGY:
We have
seen significant variations in benchmark scores from
one site to the next. Due to this fact, we feel
it is necessary to explain exactly how we configure
each test system before we run any benchmarks. When
testing these boards, the first thing we did was enter
the system BIOSes and set each board to "Load
Optimized Defaults". We then configured the Memory CAS
Latency and other memory timings to be set by the SPD,
but ran the memory at 166MHz on the AT7 and at 133MHz
on the IT7. The RAID array was then formatted, and
Windows XP Professional was installed. After Windows
XP Professional was completely installed, we hit the
Windows Update site and downloaded all of the
available updates, with the exception of the ones for
Windows Messenger. Then we installed all of the
necessary drivers, disabled and removed Windows
Messenger, disabled Auto-Updating, disabled System
Restore and set a 768MB permanent swap file. Lastly we
set the Visual Effects to "best performance",
installed all of the benchmarking software, defragged
the hard drive and ran all of the tests at the CPU's
default and overclocked speeds. Now, on to our
results...
 |
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The Hot Hardware Test Systems |
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You Just Have to
Love Them! |
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AMD Athlon XP 2100+ (1733MHz)
Abit AT7 (VIA KT333)
512MB TwinMos PC2700 (CAS 2)
NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti
4600 (23.82 Drivers)
On-Board NIC
On-Board Sound
IBM 7200RPM 30GB HD
x 2
Creative Labs 52X
CD-Rom
Standard Floppy
Drive
Windows XP
Professional
DirectX 8.1
Via 4-in-1s v.4.39
|
Intel Pentium 4
2.2GHz (2200MHz)
Abit IT7 (Intel i845e)
512MB TwinMos PC2700 (CAS 2)
NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti
4600 (23.82 Drivers)
On-Board NIC
On-Board Sound
IBM 7200RPM 30GB HD
x 2
Creative Labs 52X
CD-Rom
Standard Floppy
Drive
Windows XP
Professional (DirectX 8.1)
Intel Chipset
Drivers v4.00.1013
Intel Application Accelerator v2.2
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Performance Comparisons with SiSoft
SANDRA |
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Time for some
numbers... |
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SANDRA (the
System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting
Assistant) is an information and diagnostic utility
put out by the good folks at SiSoftware. Besides
benchmarking, it provides a host of other information
about your hardware and software. We began our
testing with four of the built-in sub-system tests that
are part of the SANDRA 2002 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Memory
and File System). We tested the AT7 at our CPU's
default clock speed of 1733MHz (13 x 133) and while
overclocked to 1846MHz (13 x 142). With the IT7, we
ran the tests at the CPU's default clock speed of 2200MHz
(22 x 100) and while overclocked to 2442MHz (22 x 111).
|
AT7 |
AT7 OC |
IT7 |
IT7 OC |
CPU
1733MHz (13x133)
166MHz Memory
|
CPU
1846MHz (13x142)
175MHz Memory
|
CPU
2200MHz (22x100)
133MHz Memory
|
CPU
2442MHz (22x111)
144MHz Memory
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Multimedia
|
Multimedia
|
Multimedia
|
Multimedia
|
Memory
|
Memory
|
Memory
|
Memory
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Hard Drive - RAID 0
|
Hard Drive - RAID 0
|
In the CPU
tests, at default clock speeds, it is obvious that both
boards are performing on par with competitive systems in
SANDRA's database. When overclocked, however, both
the AT7 and IT7 surged passed all of the other systems.
We saw the same pattern in the Multimedia test.
Something to note is that the AMD test system beat the
Intel system in the CPU and Multimedia tests. The
tables are turned in the memory bandwidth and file system
tests though, showing a clear advantage on the Intel side.
We tested file system performance using a pair of IBM 30GB
hard drives setup in a RAID 0 configuration, and although
both boards were equipped with the same HPT374 controller,
we saw the i845E based IT7 had a clear advantage.
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Benchmarks with Quake 3 Arena |
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More of What You're
Lookin' For! |
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In this next
test, we have Quake 3 Arena v1.17 Time Demo scores taken
at a resolution of 640X480 using 16-bit color and
textures. Running Quake 3 with these minimal
settings allows the motherboards and processors to push as
many polygons as possible, without being limited by the
graphics subsystem.
Quake 3 Arena
has always favored the Pentium 4. In this test, the
IT7 managed to outpace the AT7 by 8FPS, or about 3.3%.
A difference this small is nothing to get excited about
though. What do you say we move on to our next test,
to see if the performance delta is more pronounced?
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Performance Comparisons with PC Mark 2002 |
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CPU and Memory
Torture... |
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MadOnion's
PCMark 2002 benchmarking suite, is rapidly gaining
acceptance amongst on-line PC hardware testing community.
PCMark 2002 is very simple to run, and produces repeatable
results. We ran their "CPU" and "Memory" performance
modules, which incorporate the following tests:
CPU Test:
PCMark's CPU
test also shows the i845E powered IT7 / P4 combo
outperforming the VIA KT333 based AT7 / Athlon XP combo by
a slim margin of 177 points, or 3.3%. The difference
here is still too miniscule to mean much to end users.
Next up is the memory test.
Memory Test
Technical details: (Quoted)
Raw read,
write, and read-modify-write operations are performed
starting from a 3072 kilobytes array decreasing in size to
1536 KB, 384 KB, 48 KB and finally 6 KB. Each size of
block is tested two second and the amount of accessed data
is given as result. In the STL container test a list of
116 byte elements is constructed and sorted by an integer
pseudo-random key. The list is then iterated through as
many times as possible for 2 seconds and the total size of
the accessed elements is given as result. There are 6 runs
of this test, with 24576 items in the largest run
corresponding to a total data amount of 1536 KB,
decreasing in size to 12288 items (768 KB), 6144 items
(384 KB), 1536 items (96 KB), 768 items (48 KB) and 96
items in the smallest run corresponding to 6 KB of total
data.
In PCMark's
memory test, the IT7 leapt ahead the AT7. The IT7
managed to post a score 1228 points, or 35% higher than
the AT7. I don't put too much stock in this
synthetic test though. I have yet to see a 2200MHz
P4 outperform an Athlon XP 2100+ by a 35% margin in any
real world situations.
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Jammin' to the
Stones
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