Epox 5LWA+ i925XE Motherboard
How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered the system BIOS and set each board to their "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults". The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 was installed. When the installation was complete, 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, and removed Windows Messenger from the system altogether. Auto-Updating and System Restore were also disabled, and we setup a 1536MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance", installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives and ran all of the tests.
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| SYSTEM 1: Shuttle SB95P Intel 925XE Chipset Intel Pentium 4 550 3.4GHz CPU 2x512MB Corsair XMS2 Pro DDR2 ASUS Extreme AX800XL On-Board 10/100/1000 Ethernet On-Board Audio 120GB Seagate Barracuda 7,200 RPM SATA Hard Drive Windows XP Pro SP2 ATi Catalyst 5.3 Drivers DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 2: Epox 5LWA+ Intel 925XE Chipset Intel Pentium 4 550 3.4GHz CPU 2x512MB Corsair XMS2 Pro DDR2 ASUS Extreme AX800XL On-Board 10/100/1000 Ethernet On-Board Audio 120GB Seagate Barracuda 7,200 RPM SATA Hard Drive Windows XP Pro SP2 ATi Catalyst 5.3 Drivers DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 3: Intel 915PBL Intel 915P Chipset Intel Pentium 4 550 3.4GHz CPU 2x512MB Corsair XMS2 Pro DDR2 ASUS Extreme AX800XL On-Board 10/100/1000 Ethernet On-Board Intel High Definition Audio 120GB Seagate Barracuda 7,200 RPM SATA Hard Drive Windows XP Pro SP2 ATi Catalyst 5.3 Drivers DirectX 9.0c |
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We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran three of the built-in sub-system tests (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth) that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite of benchmarks. All of these tests were run with the Epox 5LWA+ powered by an Intel Pentium 4 550 3.4GHz CPU with 1GB of Corsair DDR2 and compared against similar systems from SANDRA's database.
;) SANDRA CPU Arithmetic Benchmark Pentium 4 550 @ 3.4GHz 1024MB DDR2 (CL4) |
;) SANDRA Memory Benchmark Pentium 4 550 @ 3.4GHz 1024MB DDR2 (CL4) |
;) SANDRA CPU Multimedia Benchmark Pentium 4 550 @ 3.4GHz 1024MB DDR2 (CL4) |
The 5LWA+ proved to be right on target with expected CPU output of a Pentium 4 550, although slightly behind in the memory bandwidth. Performance-wise, that's quite good, as the 5LWA+ consistently remained at or near the top of some high-end equipment that we chose for comparison. Synthetic benchmarks only tell half of the story, however, as we will need to compare performance in SANDRA, 3DMark, et al. with what we get in real-world gaming benchmarks to get the full picture of the capabilities of this motherboard.
