Benchmarking

- Test System

Processor: Intel Pentium 4 2GHz (20x100)

Motherboard: Abit BD7II-RAID (i845E), DFI NS70-EL (SiS645DX), Abit BD7-RAID (i845D)

Memory: OCZ 256MB PC2700

Video Card: Prolink Pixelview GeForce3

Sound Card: Creative Soundblaster Audigy Platinum eX

Hard Disk: Quantum Fireball Plus LM 15GB ATA100

Operating System: Windows 2000 Professional SP2

Drivers: nVidia DetonatorXP v23.11, DirectX 8.1

Software Used: SiSoft Sandra 2002, 3DMark2001 SE, Quake III Arena, Content Creation Winstone 2001, Business Winstone 2001

Results - SiSoft Sandra 2002

SiSoft Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) 2001 is a synthetic windows benchmark that features different tests used to evaluate different PC subsystems.

As expected, all three boards performed virtually identically in the CPU benchmark, however, when we take a look at the memory benchmark we see the SiS645DX chipset pull quite far ahead. This is due to the fact that the SiS645DX supports DDR333 memory, while the i845D/E chipsets only support DDR266. If the BD7/BD7II boards were overclocked to run at DDR333 memory speeds, the FSB would have to be adjusted which would also overclock the CPU, PCI and AGP bus, making it an uneven playing field.

Unfortunately a VIA P4X333 based motherboard was unavailable at the time of testing.