ECS P4IBAD versus Transcend TSABR4

ECS P4IBAD versus Transcend TS-ABR4
Budget i845s Do Battle!

By, Marco Chiappetta
March  28, 2002

TESTING METHODOLOGY: As we've mentioned in previous reviews, because we have seen quite a variation in benchmark scores from one site to the next, we feel it is necessary to explain exactly how we configure each test system before we run any benchmarks. The first thing we did was enter the system BIOS and set the board to it's "High Performance Default" settings. We then set the Memory frequency to 133MHz, and set the CAS Latency and other memory timings to 2-7-2-2. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional was installed. After XP was completely installed, we hit the Windows Update site and downloaded all of the available updates, with the exception of Windows Messenger. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers, disabled Windows Messenger, disabled Auto-Updates, set a 768MB swapfile and disabled System Restore. Lastly we set the Visual Effects to "best performance", installed all of the benchmarking software, defragged the hard drive and ran the tests at the CPU's default and overclocked speeds.  Now, on with the results... The Hot Hardware Test Systems It took 30 years to hit 1GHz, and 18 months to hit 2GHz!   HARDWARE USED: Pentium 4 2.2GHz (2200MHz. Northwood Core)   ECS P4IBAD i845D S478 Motherboard Transcend TS-ABR4 i845D Motherboard   256MB Crucial PC2100 DDR SDRAM 30GB IBM 75GXP 7200 RPM Hard Drive On-Board AC'97 Sound Linksys 10/100 NIC GeForce 3 Ti500 (240MHz. Core / 500MHz. Memory) 16X Acer DVD-ROM Drive Standard 3.5 Floppy Drive   SOFTWARE USED: Windows XP Professional DirectX 8.1 NVIDIA Reference Drivers 27.50 Intel Chipset Drivers v3.20   Performance Comparisons Time for some numbers...

SiSOFT SANDRA:

We began our testing with four of the built-in sub-system tests in SiSoftware's Sandra 2002 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Memory and File System), running at the CPU's default clockspeed of 2.2GHz (22 X 100MHz FSB). 

As you can see, both boards performed very similarly in all of these tests, as well they should!  Because both boards are based on the exact same chipset, with a similar BIOS and were using all of the same "supporting" hardware, we expect their performance to be within a few points of one another.  When compared with the reference systems in SiSoftware's database, we find that the ECS P4IBAD and Transcend TS-ABR4 performed at proper levels.  In CPU and Multimedia tests, both boards scored very well, but lagged just a bit behind similar systems on the Memory Bandwidth and Files System (Hard Drive) tests.  In the very important Memory Bandwidth tests, the Transcend TS-ABR4 edged out the ECS board by the slimmest of margins.

OVERCLOCKED:

While both of these boards were not designed with overclocking as a top priority, we did have decent luck squeezing a few more MHz. out of our CPU.  Earlier, when we spoke about overclocking in the BIOS sections.  We mentioned that the maximum FSB we were able to hit with both boards at default voltage was 111MHz, for a top overclocked speed of 2442MHz (22 x 111MHz.)  While we had the machines overclocked, we ran the CPU and Memory Bandwidth tests again.  Both boards showed significant gains while overclocked, and once again the Transcend board scored every so slightly higher.

Performance Comparisons Time for some numbers...

VIDEO 2000 MPEG ENCODE:

We also ran the MPEG encoding test embedded in MadOnion's Video 2000 benchmark.  This test uses the host CPU to encode a short clip of video.  The scores posted by the ECS P4IBAD and Transcen TS-ABR4 were virtually identical and well with the "margin of error" for this test.