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The DFI AD70-SR Motherboard Review
More KT266A
Lovin' In The House! |
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By,
Jeff Bouton
December 6, 2001 |
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Overclocking |
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Kicking Into
Overdrive ... |
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Having
reviewed several Pentium III based DFI boards in the
past, I knew that overclocking wasn't one of DFI's
strongest points...or so I thought. After
setting the multiplier
dip-switch
settings to 11, our 1.2GHz processor ran beautifully
at 1463MHz., not needing any other adjustments.
Next we increased the bus-speed to 135 and rebooted
the system. At 1485MHz., the system booted fine,
but once we attempted to run any Sandra tests, the
system would spontaneously reboot.
With a
little adjusting the the CPU VCore Adjust setting, we
managed to stabilize the system with an increase to
1.85V. We loaded Windows and found the system to
be quite stable, experiencing no difficulty running
our Sandra benchmarks as well as editing
screen-captures and the like. After all was said
and done, we managed to increase the CPU output by
23.75%!
Next,
we'll take a look at our Sandra results at both
default and overclocked speeds to demonstrate the
boards capacity as well as the gains achieved from the
overclock.
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The Hot Hardware Test Systems |
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Not Bad At
All... |
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AMD Athlon @ 1200MHz.
DFI AD70-SR Via KT266A
256MB IBM PC2100
(CAS 2)
GeForce 3 Ti500
(21.85 Drivers)
Hercules Game
Theater XP
2 - Seagate 20GB
7200RPM Hard Drives
(Provided by Arena Computers!)
Pioneer 16X/40x
DVD-ROM
Standard Floppy
Drive
Windows 2000 SP2
DirectX 8.1
Via 4-in-1s
v.4.35
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*Note: Normally we like to compare the
performance of a particular piece of hardware with
a similar item from another manufacturer. In
this review, however, the AD70-SR motherboard is
the first KT266A with RAID that we've had the
pleasure of reviewing. With that said, you
will not find any comparison with this product,
but you may see it in future reviews of KT266A and
RAID motherboards as a comparison product.
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Performance With Sisoft Sandra |
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Synthetic
Performance Numbers... |
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When
it comes to synthetic
benchmarks, I don't think there is another utility more
popular than Sisoft Sandra. So we ran several of the
more popular benchmarks on the AD70-SR to see how it
performed. First we ran the CPU Arithmetic test to
determine the systems floating point capability.
Then we ran the CPU Multi-Media Benchmark to assess how
the processor handles multi-media instructions.
After that, we ran them again with the CPU at the maximum
speed we were able to achieve with this board ...
CPU @ 1200MHz
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CPU @ 1485MHz
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MM @ 1200MHz
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MM @ 1485MHz
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At the default
clock speed of 1200MHz. our processor's performance was
on-par with equivalent models, then again, that is what we
expected. Once we turned up the multiplier to 11,
our chip really showed its meddle. In both tests,
our 1.2GHz processor running at 1485MHz., soared in the
CPU Arithmetic test, blowing past a 2GHz. P4 in ALU tests,
but it was not quite up to the FPU challenge. In the
Multi-Media test, our processor ran so close to the 2GHz.
P4 that it was hard to tell the two apart.
MEM
@ 1200MHz
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Hard Drive (Single)
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Hard Drive (RAID-0)
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When it came
to the memory performance, the AD70-SR was not quite up to
snuff compared to other systems, but after working on
several DFI boards, I wasn't surprised.
In my experience
reviewing other DFI motherboards, I have found that they
may not be the fastest boards on the market, but they rank
pretty high. Their memory timings tend to be a
little less aggressive than the competition, but the board
will usually over clock fairly well and remain stable.
Personally, in the real world I don't notice the lower
memory bandwidth as much as I do notice the total
system stability. I think it is a fair trade.
The hard drive
performance of the AD70-SR was a little more peculiar.
Initially we connected a single hard drive to the 1st IDE
connector and ran Sisoft Sandra's File System test.
The AD70-SR put up a surprising score that exceeded the
baseline. However, once we set up our RAID-0 array
and re-ran the numbers, the score actually dropped by
about 4000 points. Puzzled by this, I did two
separate installations of Windows 2000 again, with both
the Single-Drive configuration and then with RAID-0.
We re-ran the File System test again and the scores were
almost identical. This may be an issue with our hard
drives, at this point we are not sure why there is a
performance drop. Perhaps there is an
incompatibility with our Seagate hard drives and the
Promise Controller or Sandra and the Promise drivers we
used. I must mention though, the system did, in fact, feel
much snappier with RAID-0 than without.
Now let us
move on to some more number crunching...
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More
Benchmarks & The Rating... |
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