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Let's
take a little side step and have a look at some of
the gear we used in our test machine. As you
may or may not have known, Intel has released the
1GHz. FCPGA (or Flip Chip as it is known) and we
used this as our processor for testing here.
Let's take a look at this little gem.
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| Installation
/ Setup With The SA6R |
| A
new motherboard call for a new
processor, right? |
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Behold
the 1GHz. Pentium III FCPGA
This
is pretty much representative of what you'll see
in a retail processor for this speed grade from
Intel. The heat sink is from a company
called Showa
Aluminum. This is definitely a custom
made sink for Intel, because these folks obviously
aren't set up for general distribution of a
specific product but only for their metal
processing services. It does work VERY well
though. On par with the performance level of
a large Global Win unit.
We
were supplied an Engineering Sample chip from
Intel which is to be used for testing purposes
only and not a retail product. This chip has
the multiplier unlocked and can be set up a number
of ways with the multiplier adjustments of a given
motherboard like the SA6R. This allows for
very easy configuration and bench testing for
folks like us. As a result, we can set this
baby up as a P3-866, 933 or 1GHz. and get very
solid real world results with bus speeds running
within the retail product specifications
etc. Regardless, as you are aware, this
processor when coupled with the right motherboard,
can really deliver on performance. We'll
have more details on just kind of performance you
can expect, shortly.
The
BIOS:
Folks
this is one sexy BIOS... I mean as BIOS goes that
is..
FSB
Clocks
Clock Division
DRAM Timings
Health
Monitoring
High Point RAID
BIOS
Integrated Peripherals
First
things first... the FSB settings with the PLL
Clock Driver on this board, as you can see, has a
range from 50 - 250MHz., all in 1MHz.
increments. Now that folks, is a thing of
beauty. You can also select divider settings
that will break down the Front Side Bus to various
derivatives for your SDRAM and PCI clocks.
For example you can select 4:4:1 and 4:3:1 for a
Front Side Bus setting of 133MHz. This will
give you 133, 133, and 33 respectively for CPU,
SDRAM and PCI clocks, in the case of the 4:4:1
setting and 133, 100, and 33 for the 4:3:1
setting. This feature will provide good
flexibility for users who want high bus speeds for
the processor but their memory needs something
more relaxed, say at PC100 specs. The AGP
bus speed is always set to 1/2 the Front Side Bus
or 66MHz. Also there is a CPU core voltage
adjustment that allows you to turn up or down the
CPU supply voltage in .5 V increments up to 1.95V,
in the case of a Coppermine P3.
RAID
Rocks!
The
other feature that really stands out here is the
High Point RAID BIOS and its capabilities in
general. We installed 2 ATA100, 7200 RPM IBM
drives and created a "Mode 0" array,
which is the highest performance RAID setting you
can choose. Mode 0 "stripes" the
information across the two drives and allows you
to set up one large partition so the OS sees it as
one drive. In our case, we used two 15 Gig
drives and Windows 98SE saw it as a one 30 Gig,
once we partitioned and formatted it in RAID 0
mode. For a little more detail as to how
this setup works, check
out this page of our SE6 review. It even
has diagrams and pictures. :) Setting
up a RAID array is a lot easier than you may think
however and has become a very practical means of
increasing you storage capacity and
performance! You don't even have to use
identical drives to do it.
Now
that we are set up. Let's crank it up!
Over-clocking
and Benchmarks !
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