P4 i845 SDRAM Motherboards from Asus and MSI
The Asus P4B and MSI 845Pro2-R  do battle

By, Dave Altavilla
September 24th, 2001

Before we show you the benchmarks, please take note of the various test systems used.

HotHardware's Test Setup i850 w/ RDRAM, i845 w/ SDRAM and Athlon w/ DDR

Sandra and The Winstones Light duty work

Sandra scores are provided for reference but due to the fact that these are "synthetic" tests, they may or may not be indicative of real world performance.

MSI 845Pro2-R:

 
Asus P4B:

If you note the scores (top bars in each graph) in each of the categories for both i845 boards, there are subtle differences.  The Asus board wins out on the CPU test with its slightly more aggressive processor clock timing.  The MSI board takes the memory benchmark by a nose, with its more robust memory timing.  Either way, both boards fall far behind the RDRAM reference system in this test for memory bandwidth, as expected.  What is surprising is that Sandra is reporting higher overall system memory bandwidth than the DDR Athlon reference systems that are listed.  This may be in part, a result of the test's consideration of CPU and cache memory bandwidth as well.  Either way, Sandra scores should be taken with a grain of salt.

Let's look at some scores with real world applications as the yardstick for measurement.

Here we see the kind of results that were to be expected with this budget Pentium 4 chipset.  In each of the tests, the i845 boards trail both the i850 P4 and Athlon DDR based systems.  In the Biz Winstone test, the i845 based MSI 845Pro2-R and Asus P4B, are very close to the RDRAM based system.  These tests hardly tax the horsepower of modern day processors however and are utilizing applications the run legacy code not optimized for the P4. 

Let's move on to more strenuous testing.

3DMark 2001, Video 2000, Q3 and our ratings