Foxconn 925XE7AA-8EKRS2 i925XE Motherboard
HH Test Bed and SANDRA 2005
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 its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults." We then manually configured our RAM to run at 266MHz (DDR533), with the timings set by the SPD. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) 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, drive indexing, and System Restore were also disabled, and we set up a 768MB 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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| SYSTEMS: Socket T - Pentium 4 530 (3GHz) Foxconn 925XE7AA-8EKRS2 Motherboard ASUS P5GDC-V Deluxe 915G MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum PQI24200-1024GDB GeForce PCX5750 On-Board 10/100/1000 Ethernet On-Board Audio WD 30GB Hard Drive 7200 RPM PATA Windows XP Pro SP2 |
SiSoft SANDRA 2005 FutureMark's 3DMark05 FutureMark's PCMark04 Professional Windows Media Encoder 9 XMPEG Unreal Tournement 2004 Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory Content Creation Winstone 2004 Business Winstone 2004 |
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Starting off our benchmarking segment, we have results from several modules within SiSoft SANDRA 2005 to get a quick assessment of a system's performance. Using SANDRA's ever growing internal database, we can get a feel for how a particular setup compares to its peers. Typically, we like to run the CPU, Multimedia, and Memory components of SANDRA to get a baseline representation of performance.
;) CPU Test @ 3GHz |
;) Multimedia Test @ 3GHz |
;) System Memory @ DDR533 |
Our first run was with the CPU test, which yielded little surprises. The Foxconn-based test bed was on par with the reference system running the same Pentium 4-E 530. The ALU tests favored the Foxconn board while its FPU test fell slightly short of the reference system. The Multimedia test results were also in the same ballpark as the reference Pentium 4-E 530 system. Here, the Foxconn led in the Floating-Point portion of the test by almost 100 points, while it fell short in the Integer test by 154 points. Memory performance was strong, with the Foxconn 925XE7AA-8EKRS2 falling in line where it should be.
