X-bit labs

ASRock 4Core1333-eSATA2 Mainboard on Intel P31 Express Chipset (page 8)

Category: Mainboards

by Doors4ever

[ 12/26/2007 | 11:53 AM ]

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 Overclocking and Performance Tests

Our test session was carried out on the following test platform:

• Mainboard: ASRock 4Core1333-eSATA2 (rev. G/A 5.05), BIOS P1.30;
• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86GHz, FSB 266MHz, 2MB, Conroe-2M, rev. B2);
• Memory: 2x1024MB Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-9136C5D;
• Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB;
• HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10, ST3320620AS, 7200RPM, 16MB, SATA 320GB;
• CPU cooler: Zalman CNPS9700 LED;
• PSU: SunbeamTech Nuuo SUNNU550-EUAP (550W).

The memory was set as DDR2 533 with the jumper and we tried to overclock Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor. Our attempt failed, because the board could only start and boot Windows at 360MHz FSB. At 370MHz FSB the system wouldn’t start, although the processor can run at up to 490MHz FSB frequency. Of course, it hardly makes any sense to run performance tests with insignificant overclocking results like that. Therefore, we decided to precede to the performance tests in the nominal mode.

You may have noticed from the first BIOS photo that ASRock 4Core1333-eSATA2 recognizes Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-9136C5D memory exclusively as DDR2 667 and sets its frequency to 333MHz accordingly. When we tried to run the tests at 400MHz (DDR2 800) with 4-4-4-12 timings, we failed, because the system was very unstable. So we had to switch to 5-5-5-18 timings. As a reference for our performance analysis we chose abit IP35 Pro mainboard on Intel P35 Express chipset configured identically.

The results turned out quite good. ASRock 4Core1333-eSATA2 mainboard on Intel P31 Express chipset performed practically identically to the solution on Intel P35 Express in nominal mode.

The chipsets perform equally fast, but the mainboards are hardly comparable, as you may have understood already. ASRock 4Core1333-eSATA2 ran almost at the utmost of its potential, while the abilities of abit IP35 Pro were intentionally limited for the sake of fair comparison. You can easily lower the memory timings, increase the memory frequency, overclock the CPU to its maximum on abit IP53 Pro, and it will easily leave behind ASRock 4Core1333-eSATA2 that can simply do none of the above.