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We'll close this showcase up with a few scores from Quake 3
Arena set at 640X480 at 16 bit color. We also set
texture detail and geometry to a modest "medium" setting.
This should allow our GeForce3 Ti 500 test card to avoid
being the bottleneck and let the motherboards exhibit their
best overall CPU integer and floating point performance.
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Quake 3 Arena |
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Letting the CPU
run flat out |
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It was
interesting to see that the P4S Dragon Ultra with its full
PC2700 (2.7GB/sec of bandwidth) DDR DRAM performance levels,
didn't completely walk away with this test. Again,
we'll chalk that up to the fact that the i845 has been out
on the market a lot longer (remember it was released with
SDR DRAM support first) than the SiS645 and it's AGP
drivers are a little more mature. You may see this gap
widen as the weeks and months roll on for the SiS645.
The P4I Fire Dragon comes in neck and neck with the Abit
offering, showing that it can hold its own with others of
its kind.
The P4S Dragon
Ultra and the P4I Fire Dragon from Soyo, are two motherboard
that show fantastic promise as they mature. Yes, we
did indeed have a few issues with their BIOS setups but we
feel confident that these are easily resolved in future
releases. What impressed us the most with the P4S
Dragon Ultra and the P4I Fire Dragon, was their fantastic
levels of integration and overall "bang for the buck" with
all of the added features, bells and whistles. These
boards may end up costing just a few dollars more than
competitive products but with integrated 10/100 Ethernet,
RAID, Sound and even Fire Wire, the slight extra investment
will be easily justified for most.
Finally overall
stability once these boards were set up, with either the P4S
or P4I, was excellent. Soyo has been know over the
years for producing very high quality motherboards and these
two are no exception. The P4S Dragon Ultra and P4I
Fire Dragon are "enthusiast" motherboards setup for
over-clocking and tweaking and they handle very well under
pressure.
We're giving the
Soyo P4S Dragon Ultra and P4I Fire Dragon motherboards a
Heat Meter rating of...
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