Dueling i845 DDR Boards From Abit and Asus
Abit's BD7-RAID and Asus' P4B266 Take Flight

By, Dave Altavilla
January 23, 2002

 
Please take note of our test system setup, so you can draw reference points on relative performance characteristics of all products.

HotHardware's Test System Driving the P4 Northwood

Test-Bed:

Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz. Northwood Processor

Motherboard and RAM Config #1:
Abit TH7-RAID Motherboard - i850 (No RAID used)

256MB of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS RDRAM

Motherboard and RAM Config #2:

Asus P4B266 Motherboard - i845 DDR

256MB of Corsair PC2400 DDR SDRAM

Motherboard and RAM Config #2:

Abit BD7-RAID - i845 DDR

256MB of Corsair PC2400 DDR SDRAM
Other Hardware and Software:

IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive

Dual Maxtor D740X - ATA133 40Gig 7200 RPM Hard Drives (for RAID testing only on the Abit BD7-RAID)

Sound Blaster Live Value

Windows XP Professional

Direct X 8.1

GeForce3 Ti500 Graphics Card

nVidia Detonator 4 reference drivers version 21.85

Intel chipset drivers version 3.20
 

Overclocking The i845D Abit and Asus Style

First, a look at what Abit's BD7-RAID could do with it's slightly lower core voltage settings.

Abit BD7-RAID and P4 Northwood @ 2.53GHz (115MHz. FSB)

And now for the Asus results of our over-clocking test.

Asus P4B266 and P4 Northwood @ 2.64GHz. (120MHz. FSB)

We missed scrolling down in the screen shot for the Abit board at 2.53GHz., so you could see the CPU clock and FSB speed like the Asus shot.  You'll just have to trust us on this one.  ;-)  The BD7-RAID was able to hit a front side bus speed of 115MHz. for a total of 2.53GHz. on our 2.2G Pentium 4.  That's not too shabby at all.  However, if the BIOS allowed us a few more tenths of a volt for tweaking, we could have hit the 2.64GHz. mark, like the Asus P4B266 was able to reach.  Again, we feel confident that Abit is but a BIOS revision away from making that a reality.

Let's look at a few more SiSoftware Sandra scores here.
 

SiSoftware's Sandra Benchmarks Synthetic Benchmark Testing

Both boards are neck and neck here in the Sandra suite of testing.  It is safe to say this is nearly identical performance and the numbers fall well within the standard deviation for the test itself.  There is no real advantage of one board versus the other.  However, you might have noticed that the Asus P4B266, in the CPU test, is clocked slightly more aggressively at 2.22G versus the BD7-RAID's 2.2G CPU clock.  Basically, what Asus is doing here is slightly over clocking their boards, out of the box.  Are they doing this in an effort to get an edge in the benchmarks?  It's really hard to say but it is fairly obvious to the trained eye, that often times Asus motherboard PLL Clocks are often tweaked ever so slightly on the high side. 

Finally, we normally don't include Sandra Drive scores but in this case, the BD7-RAID from Abit offers something special.  As you can see, the on board Highpoint Controller performs on par with the ATA100 RAID setup reference system, in this test.  Even though we used two shiny new Maxtor ATA133 7200 RPM Drives for our ATA133 driven RAID0 Striped Array, the performance was no better than a standard ATA100 RAID0 setup.  It seems the ATA133 interface need to mature somewhat before we'll see real gains here.  However, it is very nice to have this feature on the BD7-RAID and the 2 extra EIDE channels are always a roomy expansion option, at the very least.

Let's dig into more serious testing.

Winstones and 3DMark