ECS P4VXAD Vs. Azza P4X2AV

The ECS P4VXAD Vs. The Azza P4X2AV - Page 4

The ECS P4VXAD -Vs.- The Azza P4X2-AV
Battle of the VIA P4X266s!

By, Marco Chiappetta
November 29, 2001

Synthetic benchmarks and Quake 3 scores only show part of the picture.  We'll move on to some "real world" tests next.  We used ZD Labs' Business Winstone and Content Creation Winstone benchmarks on both boards as well...

More Performance
More of What You're Lookin' For!

ZD Labs released updates to these tests a back on September 14th., so don't compare these scores to any older ones you may find on this, or any other site.  From this point forward we'll be using the updated version (1.0.2) here on H.H.

BUSINESS WINSTONE:

Business Winstone runs a few popular "office-type" applications through a series of scripted activities, monitors how long the system takes to complete those activities and calculates a score accordingly.  The ECS P4VXAD performed just slightly higher than the AZZA P4X2 in this test, but either board can run this type of application with plenty of headroom to spare.

CONTENT CREATION WINSTONE:

The Content Creation 2001 tests are similar to the Business tests, but consist of some more bandwidth hungry applications like Adobe Premiere 5.1(used for video editing) and Photoshop 5.5 (used for image editing).  Once again ECS takes a small performance lead.  I guess the higher memory scores the Azza P4X2 posted in the Sandra tests didn't translate into any real world performance advantage.

CONCLUSION:
After spending a significant amount of time using both of these boards I find it very difficult to come up with a rating.  Both the ECS P4VXAD and Azza P4X2 do exactly what they were meant to do.  Performance with both of these boards is right where is should be, but I must admit I am a bit disappointed.  With all of the legal issues surrounding the VIA P4X266 chipset, and the resulting lack of competition in the P4 DDR motherboard market, manufacturers like ECS and AZZA have been presented with the perfect opportunity to entice enthusiasts with features and performance that they wouldn't be able to find anywhere else at this price point (at least for now).  Unfortunately, in my opinion, neither company has capitalized on this opportunity.  Had there been better overclocking features, like voltage settings, and more features like on-board RAID,  6-Channel sound or an on-board NIC, the story would be different.  For now though, I just don't see too many "power" users getting excited over these products.

That is not to say these boards do not have a place in any of your systems. We can't hold too much against either company for not living up to our expectations, as long as they live up to their claims.  Both the ECS and Azza boards worked as they should, and bring great performance and DDR capability to Intel's Pentium 4, at a price point unheard of a few moths ago.

Based on it's price, performance, ease of installation, stability and features, we give the ECS P4VXAD a HotHardware Heat Meter rating of...

The Azza P4X2 performed well, was stable throughout testing and has excellent expandability with it's six PCI slots.  However, we did hit a few "speed-bumps" with it's installation, so we're giving it a HotHardware Heat Meter rating of...

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Tags:  ECS, X2, AV, P4

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