The First Socket 7 AGP Motherboard FIC PA-2012 Revision 1.1

The Benchmarks

I compared the board with the PA-2007, once with the good old Matrox Millennium card, once with ATI's XPERT@Work PCI card. I also planned to run all AGP and PCI 3D accelerator cards I have with the K6 233, the Pentium MMX 233 and the 6x86MX PR233, alas the 6x86MX wouldn't work and hence had to be left out.

Although the PA-2012's AGP performance in 2D is better than the PCI performance, the PA-2007 with its simple PCI support is faster.

Pure PCI tests show the superiority of the PA-2007.

The NT results show the same as the Windows 95 results from above.

The 3D results with the K6 show two surprises. The AGP 3D performance of the ATI XPERT@Work is 10% lower than with the PCI version. As you can see below, this is a specific K6 problem. The other surprise is the excellent performance of the Stealth II with the Rendition Verite 2100 chip. This card is slightly slower than the Monster 3D when used with a Pentium II 300, but it seems to scale very different. This and its low price make it a very interesting card for systems with slower CPUs.

The PC Player benchmark shows that it is very different to ZD's 3D Winbench. For some strange reason the Diamond Stealth II is the slowest in this test. Again you can see that the 3D performance is higher with PCI than with AGP.

The same benchmarks with the Intel Pentium MMX 233 don't show much of a difference to the ones with the K6, although the Viper shows that you can get the expected result, where AGP is faster than PCI. The 3D Winbench shows that the Diamond Stealth II is a good 3D card for socket 7 systems.