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Benchmarks
and Comparisons |
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Getting A Feel for the Big Picture |
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Futuremark's 3DMark 2001:
For the first round of tests, we
chose Futuremark's 3DMark 2001 SE. It generates a score
after rendering scenes and measuring performance using the
MaxFX game engine, found in Remedy's popular game Max
Payne. We ran two series of tests, one at 800x600 with
32-bit color and again at 1024x768x32, both times with all
other program settings left at their defaults.
At stock speed,
the Abit BG7E produced the second highest score of the three
boards, falling behind the Gigabyte board by 105 points, a
delta of less than one percent. While this was a good
score in and of itself, we managed to increase it another
2000+ points to 16016 after overclocking. That's an
extra 15% in performance gained by maximizing the potential
of the board and CPU.
At the higher resolution, the
Abit board came in last, but by a mere margin of 50 points.
In fact, only 217 points separated the three boards in this
test, making it a virtual dead heat. Already proving to
be a quite capable board, we got an extra boost of nearly
1600 points by overclocking the system, pushing out a score
of just over 14,000.
Futuremark's
PCMark2002:
PCMark 2002 performs a series of
tasks such as image compression, text searches, and audio
conversions to generate three scores: CPU, Memory, and Hard
Disk Drive (HDD). It is a relatively quick
process for comparing the performance of two or more
systems. We ran a set of tests at a 133MHz FSB and
then ran another set after getting a stable overclock at
166MHz.
The BG7E once again produced
scores within the range of the two other I845PE based
boards, settling into a comfortable second place, 36 points
behind the leader. It was ahead of the "last place"
board by almost the same margin. Overclocked, the
score shot up to 6910, an increase of 1288 points, or 23%!
This was an impressive increase in straight out CPU
performance, which is directly in line with the 25% increase
in the front side bus speed.
In the Memory test, the Abit
BG7E earned its first victory, however slight it may have
been. It managed the high score of 6077, 12 points
higher than the Gigabyte 8PE667, and 22 points higher than the MSI
845PE Max2. Again, this can be called a
dead heat, as the differences only amounted to one tenth of
a percent. The score moved up nicely when overclocked,
just shy of 7000, an increase of 865 points.
Some gaming scores
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