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Benchmarks
and Comparisons |
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Back to the Futuremark |
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Futuremark's 3DMark 2001:
For our next test, we
chose Futuremark's 3DMark 2001 SE. It generates an
overall score
after rendering scenes and measuring performance using the MaxFX game engine, found in Remedy's popular game Max
Payne. We ran two series of tests on each
configuration, once at 800x600 with
32-bit color and again at 1024x768x32, both times with all
other program settings left at their defaults.
The VIA and SIS boards were
numbers one and two, respectively. The two boards
based on the 845PE chipset brought up the rear, but the BH7
was not quite as far behind as the BE7, only about half as far
back. The BH7 score placed the board about 3% behind
the two leaders. This was still a respectable
number, however, which was overshadowed by the score we
obtained after raising the bus speed to 163MHz. The
benchmarked score of 15,794 was just over 1800 points
higher, an increase in performance of about 13%.
At the higher resolution of
1024x768, we see that the MSI 655 Max has taken the lead,
easily outpacing all other boards. The BH7 put up a
better show than before, still behind the VIA board, but
this time only by 50 points, a delta of less than one
percent. In fact, a quick glance shows us that all
four boards are within a range of only 500 points from top
to bottom. Overclocked, the BH7 produced a healthy
score of 13,734, almost the same score that we got at
800x600.
Futuremark's
PCMark2002:
Another test from Futuremark
that we have become accustomed to using here is PCMark 2002. This test performs a series of
CPU tasks such as image compression, text searches, and
audio conversion to give us three scores: CPU, Memory, and
Hard Disk Drive (HDD). It is a relatively quick process
for comparing the performance of two or more systems. We
ran PCMark 2002 at 133MHz FSB for all of the boards, and then ran another
test on the Abit after
getting a stable overclock at 163MHz.
The VIA P4PB Ultra took the lead
in the CPU performance module by 50 points over the MSI 655
Max, followed next by the BH7 and lastly the BE7. The
grouping was tight enough to show that all of the boards
were performing well with the P4 CPU. The overclocked
score of 7616 was one of the highest that we have seen to
date, and equated to a jump of 22% over the original.
In the Memory module, we saw
perhaps the widest disparity among the boards. The MSI
655 Max, with its noticeable lead over the rest of the pack,
showed off the benefits of the Dual DDR channels. The
Dual DDR provided a boost of 12% of memory bandwidth over
the VIA and Intel boards. We were able to overcome
this offset by raising the FSB on the Abit BH7 to 163MHz,
and in effect running the RAM at 202MHz. In doing so,
we got a score of 7198, beating out the Dual DDR score of
7037 by 150 points.
Some gaming scores
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