Test Setup
I thought it would be best to use the Giga-Athlon for the test, since its power hunger would stress the boards particularly hard. I tried two different PC133 DIMMs, one 128 MB CL2 DIMM from Crucial Technologies (Micron) and one 128 MB CL2 HSDRAM DIMM from Enhanced Memory Systems. Both DIMMs are excellent performers in terms of reliability.
For the benchmarks I still used Sysmark 2000, although I've got my doubts that this benchmark is particularly useful for a motherboard evaluation. The office applications used in this benchmark are hardly able to stress the memory, and they leave the AGP completely alone. Therefore you can hardly spot performance differences between boards with Sysmark and you still don't know if your memory and AGP performs stable. I added Quake 3 Arena, Expendable and SPECviewperf 6.1.1 to the benchmark suite, because those applications make heavy usage of the memory and the AGP. Especially SPECviewperf will easily crash a system with instable memory. It can also point out performance deltas of the memory system and the AGP very well.
| Hardware Setup | |
|---|---|
| Processor for all tests | AMD Athlon Processor 1000 MHzL2-Cache running at 1/3 core clock = 333 MHz |
| Memory for all tests | Enhanced Memory Systems 128 MB HSDRAM CL2and/orCrucial Technologies (Micron) 128 MB SDRAM CL2 |
| Motherboards | Asus K7MAMD750 'Irongate' Chipset, Rev. 1.4, Chipset Rev. C stepping 6, BIOS KM130.bin, SuperBypass Enabled |
| Asus K7VVIA Apollo Pro KX133 Chipset, Rev. 1.01, BIOS 1004.02A | |
| Epox EP-7KXAVIA Apollo Pro KX133 Chipset, Rev.?, BIOS K7000324.exe | |
| VIA VT5249B1 KX133 Reference BoardRev. ?, BIOS Jan 2000 | |
| Other Hardware | |
| Graphics Card for all tests | NVIDIA GeForce 256 DDR Reference Card120 MHz Core, 300 MHz DDR-RAM 32 MB |
| Network Card for all tests | NETGEAR FA310-TX |
| Hard Drive for all systems | Seagate Barracuda ATA ST320430A |
| Driver Information | |
| VIA Drivers Windows 98 | 4in1 4.20 |
| GeForce Driver Windows 98 | NVIDIA Reference Driver Rev. 5.08 |
| GeForce Driver Windows NT4 | NVIDIA Reference Driver Rev. 5.13 |
| GeForce Driver Windows 2000t Settings | NVIDIA Reference Driver Rev. 5.13 |
| Environment Settings | |
| OS Versions | Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222 AWindows NT4 Sevice Pack 6a 4.00.1381Windows 2000 Professional 5.00.2195 |
| Screen Resolutions | 640x480x16x85 for 3D Games1024x768x16x85 for Sysmark20001280x1024x32x85 for SPECviewperf |
| DirectX Version | 7.0 |
| Quake 2 | Version 3.20command line = +set cd_nocd 1 +set s_initsound 0Crusher demo, 640x480x16 |
| Quake 3 Arena | Retail Versioncommand line = +set cd_nocd 1 +set s_initsound 0Graphics detail set to 'Normal', 640x480x16Benchmark using 'Q3DEMO1' |
| Expendable | Downloadable Demo Versioncommand line = -timedemo640x480x16 |
| Unreal Tournament | Ver. 4.05bhigh quality textures, medium quality skins, no tweaks640x480x16Benchmark using 'UTBench'. |
