Intel D845PEBT2 i845PE Motherboard Review
 Intel Appeals to the Enthusiast

By: Chris Angelini
December 29, 2002

The Hot Hardware Test Systems
Powered By The Pentium 4

 
Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz (533MHz) with HyperThreading enabled
 

Intel D845PEBT2 (Intel i845PE)

ASUS P4PE (i845PE)

ASUS P4T533-C (i850E)

 

512MB Corsair XMS3200C2 (i845PE)

512MB Samsung PC1066 RDRAM (i850E)

ATI RADEON 9700 Pro (Catalyst 2.5 Drivers)

IBM 30GB ATA-100 7200RPM

 

Windows XP Professional with SP1

Intel Chipset Drivers v.4.04.1013

Intel Application Accelerator v2.2.2

 

 

 
All of the i845PE motherboards we tested utilize PC3200 memory.  However, in the interest of achieving maximum performance, each board was configured to run at DDR333 speeds with optimized timings.  Each platform features Windows XP with Service Pack 1.  In configuring the operating system, we disable System Restore and the Automatic Updating feature.  Finally, we set all of the graphical enhancements to "Performance" in the Windows XP properties.  It should also be noted that we disabled audio and Ethernet in order to minimize the effects of these subsystems on overall performance.

 

The ASUS board ran with "turbo" memory settings, while the Intel i845PE board ran with all DDR memory settings set to 2,2,2.
Performance Comparisons with SiSoft Sandra
Synthetic Action

CPU Integer @ 3.06GHz                          CPU Float @ 3.06GHz

                   

Memory Integer @ 3.06GHz                   Memory Float @ 3.06GHz

                   

Multimedia Integer @ 3.06GHz                 Multimedia Float @ 3.06GHz

                   

The most notable difference between the three competing boards is in the memory bandwidth test.  The i850E platform outfitted with PC1066 memory can theoretically transfer up to 4.2GB per second.  As you can see, the real-world bandwidth numbers are significantly lower, but still significantly better than the competing DDR platform.  Intel's product does extremely well, but is still outpaced by ASUS' tuned P4PE motherboard.  The other tests show relatively little difference between the boards, mainly because processor performance is being tested rather than overall platform speed.

Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo
Platform Testing UT2003

Earlier we mentioned that the Pentium 4 performs best when backed by plenty of memory bandwidth.  Here we see proof of that, as the i850E board takes a narrow first-place finish.  The P4PE follows closely and Intel's D845PEBT2 brings up the rear.  Despite its finish, the Intel board does much better than we'd expect considering the company's history for conservative tuning.

Comanche 4
DirectX 8

Even while the difference between the competing boards is minimal, the results mirror what we just saw in Comanche 4. 

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