The Abit BG7E Motherboard Review
An Abit Board For the Masses...

By Robert Maloney
February 24, 2003

SANDRA (the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information and diagnostic utility put out by the folks at SiSoftware.  It's a quick and easy way to compare the CPU, Memory, and Hard drive performance of a given system against an internal database of similar systems and drives. These benchmarks are theoretical scores, and can't necessarily be measured in ?real-world? terms, but provide a good way to make comparisons amongst like components.  For each test, we chose components from the database list that we thought would be found in comparable mainstream PCs.  We ran a set of tests at 133MHz FSB, and then again while overclocked to 166MHz.
 

At the default speed of 2.26GHz, the system posted scores that were pretty darn good.  The Dhrystone score was mere points off of the database score for a 2.4GHz CPU.  The Whetstone score fell in line a bit more, right between the scores for a 2GHz and a 2.4GHz Pentium 4.  When we increased the speed to 2.82GHz, the performance increased nicely, blowing away all other contenders, including an Athlon XP 2200+ and a Pentium 4 2.66GHz CPU.   

In the multimedia tests, the performance was still there, with the Integer and Floating Point instruction scores settling in right between the two reference Pentium 4 CPUs.  These were well behind the Athlon XP scores, however.  Again, overclocking the system produced scores that were better than anything else in the SANDRA database.

 

In the memory tests, we can see how valuable the DDR333 support is to this board.  Although there were no direct comparisons, the DDR333 or PC2700 scores we obtained were better than scores for three other chipsets using the same type of memory.  When placed against PC800 RDRAM, the difference was only about 200 points, equating to a drop off of about 8%.  Running the benchmark once more when overclocked, we see that we produced scores that gave PC1066 RDRAM a run for the money.
 

The hard drive performance was not too shabby, and beat the database score for a similar ATA100 7200rpm hard drive.  Not as good as a RAID configuration, of course, but this board doesn't offer that option anyway. 

Futuremark's benchmarks take the stage