X-bit labs

Socket754 Platform: 13 Mainboards Roundup (page 34)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 11/10/2003 | 09:13 PM ]

Performance

Before we pass over to the actual benchmarks results in real applications, I think it would be interesting to measure the actual CPU clock frequency on every board. The matter is that some manufacturers tweak the clock the frequency generator, so that the CPU works at higher clock rates than the nominal when used with their mainboard. As a result these mainboards show higher results in benchmarks, although they owe this improvement only to the pure CPU overclocking.

Here I would like to point out for your information that during the tests we had to disable Dynamic Overclocking function of the MSI K8T Neo mainboard, set the Top Performance option in the BIOS Setup of Gigabyte GA-K8NNXP mainboard to Disabled, and the Performance Mode of ASUS K8V – to Standard. In case the settings in the BIOS are other than that, the actual processor clock frequency appears more than 3% above the nominal, which we cannot consider a fair testing then.

As for the actual CPU frequencies on the tested mainboards, we have to draw your attention to the fact that the CPU worked at a noticeably higher (over 1% higher) frequency in Chaintech ZNF3-150 and Gigabyte GA-K8NNXP mainboards. We shouldn’t disregard this when we analyze the results and draw conclusions.

First of all we decided to see how fast these mainboards are in gaming benchmarks: