VIA's K8T900 Chipset
How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered their system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults." The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the rest of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were 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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| SYSTEM 1: AMD Athlon 64 3700+ (2.2GHz) VIA VT5925A K8T900 Reference (K8T900/VT8251) 2x512MB PQI3200-1024DBU CL 2-2-2-5 GeForce 6800 GT On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD 80GB Hard Drive 7200 RPM IDE Windows XP Pro SP2 VIA HyperionPro 5.04a NVIDIA Forceware v81.58 DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 2: AMD Athlon 64 3700+ (2.2GHz) ECS KN1 SLI Extreme (NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI) 2x512MB PQI3200-1024DBU CL 2-2-2-5 GeForce 6800 GT On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD 80GB Hard Drive 7200 RPM IDE Windows XP Pro SP2 nForce 4 Drivers v6.70 NVIDIA Forceware v81.58 DirectX 9.0c |
Software: SiSoft Sandra 2005 FutureMark PCMark05 Content Creation Winstone 2004 PC World's World Bench 5.0 -Photoshop 7 Module -Office XP SP2 Module -Windows Media Encoder 9 Module Lame MP3 Adept Development's KribiBench v1.1 Cinebench 2003 Unreal Tournament 2004 Doom 3 |
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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 four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Cache, and Memory). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor and memory running at their respective default clock speeds of 2.2GHz and 200MHz (DDR400).
;) CPU Arithmetic Benchmark |
;) Multimedia Benchmark |
;) CPU Cache Benchmark |
;) Memory Benchmark |
Generally, we like to use SiSoft SANDRA 2005 to give a quick insight into a product's performance potential compared to SANDRA's extensive database of comparison hardware. With the K8T900 reference board, all results were within the scope of what we would expect from this particular set up. CPU and MultiMedia performance was on target for our Athlon 64 3700+ while memory performance was equally competitive. In pages ahead, we'll attempt to narrow down the performance scope with a broad range of testing applications in an effort to paint a more definitive performance picture.
