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OVERCLOCKING CAPABILITIES:
All of these boards
may have overclocking ability, but that does not
mean that they were all created equally. We
unlocked our Athlon XP 1800+, dropped the
multiplier and proceeded to find the highest
stable Front Side Bus (FSB) frequency possible
with each board. To be deemed "stable", each
board had to complete a round of 3D Mark 2001,
complete a CPU, Multimedia and RAM benchmark in
SiSoft Sandra and allow us to play
Quake 3 Arena for about a 1/2 an hour. We didn't include benchmarks
from each board while overclocked, but have stated
the maximum speed we attained at the end of each
section.
ABIT:
There is no doubt in
my mind, that from the beginning, Abit's engineers
designed the KR7A-RAID with overclocking in mind.
From within Abit's Softmenu III, multipliers are
selectable from 5x-13x+, and FSBs can be altered
in 1MHz. increments all the way up to 200MHz. (Keep
in mind that the
odds of hitting an FSB this high is very slim
though.) The VCore voltage can be raised up
to 1.85V (+.10V), the DDR DIMM voltage can be
adjusted between 2.55V-2.85V and the I/O voltage
can be adjusted as well, with a 3.5V setting and a 3.65V
setting available. With the ability to manipulate
the multiplier, FSB and the Voltages supplied to
the CPU, DDR and I/O withing the BIOS, tweaking your board for
maximum performance should be a piece of cake.
With the KR7A-RAID, we were able to hit 1743MHz
(10.5x166MHz.) with our XP 1800+, a 210MHz
increase. This may not be the highest
overclock, but it was the highest FSB in the
round-up.
ASUS:
The A7V266-E is also
well suited to overclocking, but not quite as
adept as some of the others.
Multipliers between 5x-14x are selectable, the FSB
can be adjusted in 1MHz. increments up to a
whopping 227MHz.,
and there are VCore adjustments up to 1.85V
(in.25V increments) but no DDR or I/O voltage
adjustments were present. Something worth
noting is that this board can work in a jumperless
or jumpered mode. Should a user choose not
to alter their CPU settings in the system BIOS, they
can still be altered via DIP switches mounted on
the board. The maximum FSB we were able to
hit with the A7V266-E was 158MHz. With the
multiplier set at 11, that equaled 1738MHz. Another
200+ MHz. increase.
SOYO:
Using Soyo's "Combo
Feature", which is similar to Abit's Soft
Menu III, overclocking with the K7-DRAGON+ is very
easy. Users will find items to manipulate
the CPU multiplier from 5.5x - 14x, the Front Side
Bus can be altered from 95MHz. - 166 MHz. in 1 MHz
increments and there are VCore voltage adjustments
ranging from 1.35v - 1.85v in +0.025v increments. DDR and
VIO adjustments are absent on the DRAGON+ though, so the
truly hardcore overclockers may be a tad
disappointed. We had fairly good luck
overclocking with the DRAGON+ though. We hit
a completely stable 1760MHz., 11 X 160MHz.
The highest CPU speed in the group.
MSI:
MSI has equipped the
K7T266 Pro 2 with a full compliment of
overclocking tools as well. The "Hardware monitor"
section of BIOS offers VCore voltage adjustments
(up to 1.85V) and DDR voltage adjustments (2.6V,
2.7V or Auto). FSBs are selectable up to
164MHz in 1MHz. increments and the multiplier can
be set as high as 15. The K7T266 Pro 2 was a
very stable board, hitting the second highest FSB
in the round-up. We turned up the FSB to
it's maximum setting of 164MHz and set the
multiplier to 10.5 for a top speed of 1722MHz.
with no problems. We would have loved to see
11x164, but it wasn't meant to be with our
particular CPU.
Hopefully by now,
we've given you a good idea of what these boards
are made of. The all important numbers are
up next...
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The Hot Hardware Test Systems |
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Some Bad
Mamma-Jammas! |
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COMMON HARDWARE:
AMD Athlon XP
1800+ (1533MHz.)
256MB Corsair
PC2400 (CAS 2, 4-Way Interleaving, 1T Command)
GeForce 3
Ti500 (23.11 Drivers)
3Com 3C905 NIC
Sound Blaster
Audigy
IBM 7200RPM
30GB HD X 2 (RAID 0)
Creative Labs
52X CD-Rom
Standard Floppy
Drive
Windows XP Pro
(With all current updates)
DirectX 8.1
VIA 4-in-1s
v.4.35
VIA AGP Update
v.4.10
MOTHERBOARDS:
ABIT KR7A-RAID
ASUS A7V266-E
SOYO K7-DRAGON
Plus
MSI K7T266 Pro
2
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Performance Comparisons |
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Time for
some numbers... |
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TESTING METHODOLOGY:
We have seen quite a
variation in benchmark scores from one site to the
next, so we feel it is necessary to explain
exactly how we configured these boards before
running any benchmarks. The first thing we
did was enter the system BIOS and set each board
to their "Default High Performance" settings, and
then we set the memory to CAS 2, 1T, with 4-Way
bank interleaving. The hard drives were then
connected and formatted, and Windows XP
Professional was installed. After XP was
completely installed, we hit the Windows Update
site and downloaded all of the available
updates.
We then installed all of the necessary drivers for
our hardware, disabled Windows Messenger, disabled
Auto-Updates and disabled System Restore.
Lastly we set the Visual Effects to "best
performance", installed the benchmarking software,
defragged the hard drive and ran the tests at the
CPU's default clockspeed.
The first tests we
ran were with Quake 3 Arena (v1.17) set to the "Fastest"
graphics setting at a resolution and color depth
of 640x480X16. We disabled V-Sync in
the GeForce 3's drivers, before running the
"Demo001" timedemo...
QUAKE 3 ARENA:
Pay close attention to
these graphs. Although the bars show what
seems to be a large performance gap, the
difference between the "fastest" board, the Soyo
K7-DRAGON+, and the "slowest" board, the MSI K7T266
Pro 2, was only about 7 frames per second.
All of these motherboards performed very well in
this test.
Next up we ran the
MPEG encoding test that is part of MadOnion's
Video 2000 benchmark.
VIDEO 2000 MPEG ENCODE:
The tables have turned
in this test. This time around the
K7-DRAGON+ brings up the rear while Asus's
A7V266-E outpaces all of the other contestants.
The performance difference is very small though, all four
boards scored within 1% of each other, which is
well within the "margin of error".
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SiSoft
Sandra Steps to the Plate...
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