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We'll wrap it up with a
benchmark round from the all new, and totally stunning, Unreal
Tournament 2003. We utilized the simple benchmark
script that is packaged in the game's system directory.
It runs a series of three of each "Bot Match" demos and "Fly
By" demos. We set the resolution to 800X600, so as to
take as much of the workload off the GeForce 4 as possible
and place it on CPU and System Bandwidth.
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Unreal
Tournament 2003 |
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DirectX 8 Gaming Performance |
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In the immortal
words of Yogi Berra, "it's like deja-vu all over again"!!
The i845PE i845GE based boards drop right in next to the
i850E. In fact the Asus P4PE clicks by in a photo
finish against the Iwill i850E with PC1066. But will
the Fly By run be any different.
We think we've
covered the numbers pretty well here and it doesn't seem as
though, in any real world test, that there is any
significant advantage to running an i850E based system with
RDRAM, now that the i845PE and i845GE are here. The
scores in the Fly By demo show PC1066 give the i850E a
slight edge of less than 1%, hardly user perceivable.
Today's launch
of the i845PE and i845GE chipsets for the Pentium 4
platform, marks a place in the product life cycle of the i845
chipset that shows just how far it has come, and how much it has
matured. Anyone witness to the performance of the Asus
P4PE or the Intel D845GEBV2, would surely agree that it is
hard to justify a move to a more expensive i850E board and RAMBUS memory. Intel's move away from RDRAM for next
generation chipset technology allows them to focus their
collective efforts on validating DDR platforms for higher
bandwidth and overall performance. We've shown you two
great motherboards here today, and they
both post benchmark numbers that rival anything we could
dish out from our PC1066 test-bed. You simply can't
argue with the bold fact that a the new i845PE and GE
chipset with DDR333 provide great performance and all the
latest features, save AGP 8X support.
Asus P4PE
analysis:
Specifically, the Asus P4PE motherboard we tested
impressed us like no other motherboard has in a long time.
Its wealth of features, including on board Serial ATA RAID,
Gigabit LAN, FireWire, and USB 2.0, had us wondering why
OEMs hadn't released an i850E board with these kinds of
features. The answer? Price. The lower cost of
ownership for the i845PE allows Asus to bolt on all the
creature comforts and still keep a reasonable price point.
Finally, overall performance with the Asus P4PE was easily
the best of any DDR based Pentium 4 board we've seen to
date. It kept pace with the i850E and even sneaked
past it in a few tests. If only there were AGP 8X
support, the board would be near perfect.
We're giving the
Asus P4PE a HotHardware Heat Meter rating of...
Intel
D845GEBV2 analysis:
Certainly, the Intel approach to motherboard building is
a bit conservative for our tastes. Again, we want it
all, with overclocking features and performance to boot.
However, that's our selfish perspective and it's hard to
knock Intel for the sole reason that they don't give users
the option to
overclock. We are sure there are many of you that have
no utility for overclocking and think a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 is
more than enough horsepower. Based on the performance
and features we've seen today from Intel's i845GE board, we
think many of you would be more than happy to have this
stable well rounded motherboard powering your system.
Its got integrated 10/100 Ethernet, 6 Channel Audio and 6
USB 2.0 ports. All the essential tools are there,
and Intel's RapidBoot BIOS, although it doesn't overclock,
will have you looking at a Windows desktop in record time.
Just don't expect to dish out any serious death match pain
in high resolution Quake 3 or UT2003, unless you forgo
Intel's not-so extreme integrated graphics and pop in a
GeForce 4 or Radeon 9700.
We're giving the
Intel D845GEBV2 a HotHardware Heat Meter rating of...
Discuss this
or any other Hot Hardware Review in the PC Hardware Forum!
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