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OVERCLOCKING:
We had very good luck
when overclocking with both of these
motherboards. Surprisingly, the MSI 845E
Max2 BLR, turned out to be the better of the two.
Although Abit is almost universally praised for
their overclocking friendly products, the
BD7II-RAID wasn't able to best MSI's offering this
time around. As you all know, the multiplier
is locked on all retail Pentium 4s, so we set out
to find the highest attainable speed of our
particular CPU by raising the Front
Side Bus (FSB) frequency. The CPU core voltage was set
to 1.65v (+10%), and we slowly raised the FSB
until the system was no longer stable. If
any one of our benchmarks hung, or produced any
errors whatsoever, the FSB was lowered and we re-tested the
system. With the Abit BD7II-RAID, we were
able to hit a very nice 158MHz FSB (effective
632MHz) with our 2.4GHz Pentium 4, for a top speed
of 2844MHz, and increase of 18.5%.
Occasionally though, the BD7II-RAID wouldn't
re-boot when we exited the BIOS during our overclocking
tests.
After saving our settings, the system would just
sit there with a blank screen and wouldn't POST.
If we powered the system down, and then brought it
back up a few times, it would eventually POST. This minor annoyance was probably an
issue with the early revision of the BIOS we
tested with, hopefully Abit will address this in the
future. The MSI 845E Max2 BLR,
however, fared a bit better. We were
able to push the FSB all the way up to 160MHz
(effective 640MHz), for a top speed of 2880MHz, an
increase of 20%. We should also mention that
MSI includes their "Fuzzy Logic 4" overclocking
software with the 845E Max2 BLR, which gives users
the ability to manipulate their FSB from within
Windows. I'm a "Do It Yourself"
kind of guy thouhg, so I opted to do all my overclocking
from within the BIOS!
TESTING METHODOLOGY:
We have (and we're
sure you 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 either "Load
Optimized Defaults" (Abit BD7II) or "Load
High Performance Defaults" (845E Max2 BLR).
To keep the playing field level, we then configured the
Memory CAS Latency and other memory timings to be
set by the SPD. The RAID array
was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional
was installed. After Windows was completely
installed, we hit the Windows Update site and
downloaded all of the available updates, with the
exception of the ones related to Windows Messenger. Then we installed
all of the necessary drivers, disabled
Windows Messenger and then removed it from the system. Auto-Updating and
System Restore were also disabled and we set a 768MB permanent
paging
file. Lastly, we set the Visual Effects to "best
performance", installed all of the benchmarking
software and defragged the hard drive. All of
the tests were then run 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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Lots of
Intel Hardware Here! |
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Intel Pentium 4
2.4GHz (2400MHz)
533MHz FSB
Abit BD7II-RAID (Intel i845E)
256MB Corsair
PC2700 (CAS 2) x 2
NVIDIA GeForce
4 Ti 4600
(29.42 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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Intel Pentium 4
2.4GHz (2400MHz)
533MHz FSB
MSI 845E Max2 BLR (Intel i845E)
256MB Corsair
PC2700 (CAS 2) x 2
NVIDIA GeForce
4 Ti 4600
(29.42 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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Synthetic
Goodness |
|
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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 installed hardware and
operating system.
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).
Default, and overclocked scores are both
represented below.
Abit
BD7II-RAID |
Abit
BD7II-RAID OC |
MSI
845E Max2 BLR |
MSI
845E Max2 BLR OC |
CPU
2400MHz (18x133)
133MHz Memory
|
CPU
2844MHz (18x158)
158MHz Memory
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CPU
2400MHz (18x133)
133MHz Memory
|
CPU
2880MHz (18x160)
160MHz Memory
|
Multimedia
|
Multimedia
|
Multimedia
|
Multimedia
|
Memory
|
Memory
|
Memory
|
Memory
|
Hard Drive
|
Hard Drive
|
At our
CPU's default clock speed of 2.4GHz, the Abit
BD7II-RAID managed to slightly nudge ahead of the
MSI 845E Max2 BLR in the CPU Arithmetic, CPU
Multi-Media and Memory bandwidth benchmarks.
In the File System tests though, the BD7II-RAID's
High-Point 372 powered RAID 0 array posted scores
about 10% higher than the Promise 20276 found on
the MSI board. The High-Point controller
also gives users the ability to tweak their
cluster size, something that is missing on the
Promise "Lite" controllers integrated onto most
mainboards. Obviously, when we over
clocked the systems, the scores tipped in favor of
the 845E Max2 BLR because of the higher clock
speeds we were able attain.
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Benchmarks with Quake 3 Arena |
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Low-Res Frag
Fest |
|
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 a
high-end graphics card at
these minimal settings allows the motherboards and
processors to push as many polygons as possible,
without being limited by the graphics subsystem.
Here, the MSI 845E
Max2 BLR managed to outpace the Abit BD7II-RAID by
a tiny margin. For all intents and purposes
though, these scores are identical. The
.009% performance difference falls well within the
"margin of error"!
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Performance Comparisons with PC Mark
2002 |
|
CPU and
Memory Tests |
|
Next up we have some tests from
MadOnion's PCMark 2002 benchmarking suite. PCMark 2002 is very
simple to run, and produces repeatable results.
We ran their "CPU" and "Memory" performance
modules. The CPU module incorporates the following tests:
CPU
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.
Just like in the SiSoft
SANDRA tests, the Abit BD7II-RAID outperformed the MSI
845E Max2 BLR in PCMark 2002's CPU and Memory
benchmark modules while the system was running at
default clocks speeds. As was the case with the
Quake 3 benchmark, the performance of these two boards
was virtually identical.
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Flask, 3D
Mark & The Winstones
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