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How We
Configured Our Test Systems:
The first thing
we did before testing these motherboards, was enter the
system BIOS and set each board to "Load Optimized Defaults"
("Load High Performance Defaults" in MSI's case).
We then configured our RAM to run at 200MHz (DDR400),
with the timings set to 2-2-3-5. The hard drive was
then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP1) 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 and Media Player 9. Then
we installed all of the necessary drivers, and removed
Windows Messenger from the system altogether. Auto-Updating and
System Restore were disabled as well, and we setup 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 drive and ran all
of the tests. Now, onto our results...
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HotHardware Test Setup |
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The
Cream on the Crop |
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Common
Hardware:
Intel Pentium 4 Processor
3.0GHz / 800MHz System Bus
512MB (256MB x2) Corsair XMS3200C2
ATi Radeon 9700 Pro
Seagate Barracuda V 7200 RPM SATA 120GB Hard Drive
Common
Software / Drivers:
Windows XP with SP1
DirectX 9.0a
ATi Catalyst v3.4
Intel Chipset Software v5.00.1012
Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition v3.0
Motherboards
Tested:
MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R
DFI "LANPARTY" Pro875
Chaintech 9CJS
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SiSoft
Sandra Benchmarks |
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Synthetic testing |
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SANDRA, the System ANalyzer,
Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant,
consists of
a set of information and diagnostic utilities developed by
the folks at SiSoftware. SANDRA isn't only a tool for
benchmarking though, it can also provide a host of other useful
information about your hardware and operating system. We ran
three of the built-in sub-system tests that comprise the
SANDRA 2003 suite (CPU, Multimedia and Memory). All of
these tests were run with our CPU set to its default clock
speed (3.0C GHz / 15 x 200MHz).
( ALU MEASURED IN MIPS / FPU
MEASURED IN MFLOPS )
( MEASURED IN IT/S )
( MEASURED IN MB/S )
SANDRA's CPU benchmark indicates
that all three of the boards tested performed at very
similar levels, with roughly a 1% variance between first
(MSI) and third (DFI) place. The Multimedia test tells
a very similar story, where again the performance deltas
were virtually non-existent. The Memory bandwidth
tests showed the largest performance differences between the
three boards, with an approximate 3% delta between the first and
third place finishers. The 875P Neo-FIS2R led the
pack, breaking the 5GB/s barrier, with the Chaintech and DFI
boards nipping at its heals.
Winstones and PCMark2002 Benchmarks
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