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MSI's 694T Pro
Motherboard
Let's
Shed Some Light on the Subject |
By,
Jeff Bouton
September 6th, 2001 |
The BIOS
The MSI 694T Pro board we
reviewed came equipped with AMIBIOS V1.43. This
version offers a nice array of adjustments, particularly in
the Advance Chipset & Hardware Monitor screens. When
it comes to overclocking a motherboard, the more settings
available the better. With the 694T Pro, the BIOS
provides an ample amount of adjustments to help refine and
perfect an attempted overclock.
With a vast array of Memory, AGP,
and key Voltage adjustments, the 694T Pro has all the tools
to get the board overclocked and stabilized. So
without further delay, let's start to take a look and see how
this board performed when put it through some real-world
tests. After that, we'll start playing around with
some BIOS settings to see if we can't give our test
system a little boost...
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HotHardware Test Systems |
Zesty... |
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Intel Pentium III "Tualatin"
1.20GHz.
Global Win FOP38 7000RPM
Cooler
256 Mushkin PC133 Rev. 3+
RAM
MSI 694T PRO Motherboard
Gigabyte GeForce 3 Video
card
15GB IBM 7200RPM ATA 100
Hercules Game Theater XP
Windows Millennium
Direct X 8.0a
VIA 4.32 Chipset Drivers
nVidia reference drivers
version 12.41
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Intel Pentium III "Tualatin"
1.20GHz.
Global Win FOP38 7000RPM
Cooler
256 Mushkin PC133 Rev. 3+
RAM
Intel D815EEA2 Motherboard
Gigabyte GeForce 3 Video
card
15GB IBM 7200RPM ATA 100
Hercules Game Theater XP
Windows Millennium
Direct X 8.0a
Intel ATA Storage Drivers
6.1
nVidia reference drivers
version 12.41
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For our benchmarking of the MSI 694T Pro, we've included comparison benchmarks
from our baseline system using the Intel D815EEA2
motherboard. This should highlight the strengths and
weakness' of the VIA Apollo Pro 133T vs. the Intel i815E
chipsets.
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Business and Content Creation Winstone |
Bring it on. |
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The first test we ran was
Business Winstone 2001, an acid test of today's intensive
business-oriented applications. Below it is clearly
seen that the performance of the two systems is virtually
identical.
Next we ran Content Creation Winstone 2001,
which
stresses system performance
with graphic intensive applications such as Adobe Photoshop 5.5.
Again, the performance difference is nil.
Clearly the VIA Apollo Pro
133T offers performance equivalent to that of the i815
chipset when it comes to real world application
performance. From the solid numbers we've seen here,
you can't go wrong with either system.
Let us now break away form the
real world for a moment and see what happens when we start
fiddling with some BIOS settings...hmmm?
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Overclocking The
MSI
694T Pro Motherboard |
Taking it to the
limit... |
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In previous reviews we had no
problem pushing our Tualatin processor up to 1.47GHz.
without any voltage adjustments. With the MSI 694T Pro
motherboard, we were only held back by the maximum available
FSB setting of 160MHz. At this setting, the processor
ran at a solid 1.45GHz., a gain of over 20%! Although
we would have liked the opportunity to go a little higher,
it's hard to complain about a 20% increase in system
horsepower.
Let's move on and see how
this gain translates to low-level benchmarking as well as
gaming...
Sandra, 3DMark,Quake
3,
and Final Thoughts...
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