MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum Series Motherboard
HH Test Bed, Overclocking and SANDRA
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| Hardware
MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum (i915P) |
Software
Windows XP Professional SP-2 |
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When it came to overclocking, the MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum continued to impress. We took a pretty aggressive stance from the start and hit 245MHz right from the get go without any errors whatsoever. Not satisfied, we wanted more. Knowing that we had to change memory divisors to go any higher, we set the memory frequency to run at 400MHz and continued our quest for more speed. With a few gentle increases in CPU and Memory voltages, we managed to hit a top speed of an impressive 262MHz FSB with no special cooling. This resulted in a 23% increase, pushing our CPU from 3GHz to 3.93GHz. We tried to hit that 4GHz mark, but the CPU itself just wasn't up to the task. At this FSB, we came close to bringing our memory back to its default speed, coming in at 524MHz. So what does this kind of increase bring to the performance arena. Well, we managed to push Wolfenstein: ET from 115 to 142.5 FPS, while 3DMark05's CPU tests jumped from 3007 to 3325 3DMarks. This kind of performance is outstanding with nothing more than a small voltage boost and stock Intel cooler. Naturally, we're hitting the absolute peak for this board, but there is no reason to believe, with quality hardware and ample cooling, users couldn't be running very close to these speeds or even faster.
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As always, we like to use SANDRA to get a quick assessment of how a particular motherboard fits among its peers. By comparing the performance of the 915P Neo2 Platinum with the systems in SANDRA's internal database, we can get an idea of how the board stacks up.
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At stock speeds, our Pentium 4-E 530 fell in line with what we would expect from this CPU. When we switched to memory performance, the MSI 915P Neo2 topped both the 915G and 925X reference systems. The real fun started when we increased the bus to 262MHz, pushing our CPU to 3.93GHz and memory to 524MHz DDR. Here, the test bed topped all three tests, with the most significant gains shown in the CPU tests. With memory performance, we saw an average gain of 1300MB/s in memory performance when overclocked, while CPU performance topped that of a Pentium 4-E 560.
Next, we'll turn our attention to FutureMark's 3DMark05 and PCMark04 and see how the MSI 915P Neo2 faired.
