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 | | Benchmarks and Comparisons | | Getting A Feel for the Big Picture | |
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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