Skyhawk echo-Q IMC6375 SFF PC

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 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.

Test System Specifications Three of a kind

Preliminary Benchmarks With SiSoft SANDRA 2005 Synthetic Testing Starts with SANDRA

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 Skyhawk IMC6375 powered by an Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz CPU with 512MB of Geil DDR and compared against similar systems from SANDRA's database.

SANDRA CPU Arithmetic Benchmark Pentium 4 @ 2.4GHz 512MB DDR (CL2)

SANDRA Memory Benchmark Pentium 4 @ 2.4GHz 512MB DDR (CL2)

SANDRA CPU Multimedia Benchmark Pentium 4 @ 2.4GHz 512MB DDR (CL2)

We compared our CPU Arithmetic and CPU Multimedia results to other processors in the database that would be in the same price-point/performance ratio and found that the Shykawk IMC6475 did better than or close to all of the ones we had chosen.  When compared directly to another P4 2.4GHz CPU, the scores we obtained were generally much higher, and performed closer to the 2.8GHz Pentium 4.   As far as the memory bandwidth test went, we were once again close to the top of the list.  The IMC6375 easily bested the 845PE motherboard (single channel memory), but falling slightly behind all of the dual channel boards, such as another 865 from the database, an 875P, and a newer 925.  One thing we noticed when setting up this system was that the BIOS did not offer some of the memory tweaks common to many Springdales that help elevate these boards to Canterwood (i875P) performance levels.  This might help explain the lower than hoped for scores in this test.