The MSI KT3 Ultra ARU Motherboard Review
KT333 Muscle and All the Trimmings!

By, Jeff Bouton
March 24, 2002

HotHardware Test Systems AthlonXP All the Way!!

 

Benchmarking with Sisoft Sandra 2002 Pro Starting with the Synthetic...

SiSoft Sandra 2002 Professional is an excellent utility for comparing a systems overall potential with comparison systems in the suite's internal database.  Below we've listed the scores we achieved with the KT3 Ultra ARU at both default and overclocked settings. 

CPU@1.53GHz.

CPU@1.70GHz.

The first thing you might notice is how the CPU is reported as a 1.54GHz. rather than the 1.53GHz. that the Athlon XP 1800+ is actually clocked at.  This is probably a result of the motherboard's aggressive timings, a common occurrence in higher-end performance systems with PLLs that have soft BIOS adjustable bus settings.  In the CPU tests, the test system easily dominated the Pentium 4 @ 2GHz. with the arithmetic tests but lagged in the floating point processes.  Once overclocked, the KT3 Ultra test system narrowed the margin, finding a balance between ALU and FPU processing.  In the multimedia based tests, the AthlonXP 1800+ dominated, taking a commanding lead when overclocked.

The memory performance of the KT3 Ultra was quite good, yielding a sizable gain over a KT266A based system with PC2100 DDR-RAM.  When we overclocked the system to 147MHz. BUS-Speed, the RAM performance increased quite nicely.  One of the problems we've noticed though, is that the KT333 chipset is so new that it is still identified by Sandra as a KT266A based board.  This has been noted by the Sisoft team and currently no update is available.  With that in mind, we suspect that these scores will change as the program receives future updates to correctly identify the KT333 chipset. 

 

Hard Drive - Single

Hard Drive - RAID

Hard drive performance with a single drive was on par with the reference systems in the utility.  The fun really started when we tested the systems RAID performance.  Running in a RAID-0 configuration, the score leapt off the scale, clearly surpassing anything on the on chart.  We were skeptical at first of the Promise Controller with the "Lite" BIOS since there were no advanced settings available to tweak the array.  Obviously these scores put those doubts to rest, showing that there was no sacrificing performance with the Promise "Lite" BIOS.

Now that we have a feel for how this system should perform, let's take a look at how well it does perform.
 

Benchmarks and Comparisons The CPU Tests

Throughout this portion of the review, you will find that we've compared various scores of the KT3 Ultra ARU with the ASUS A7N266-E motherboard.  We like to do this to simply show how the system performed in comparison to another test bed.  This is not done in a "shoot-out" fashion, having two systems duke it out for motherboard supremacy but rather as a frame of reference to show what you can expect in performance compared to another popular system.  The first round we've run are the CPU intensive tests, that show the systems pure CPU processing capability. 
 

MPEG-2 Encoding Performance with Video 2000:

The first test we ran was the Video 2000's MPEG-2 Encode test.  This is an excellent test to demonstrate pure CPU processing performance of a motherboard since the encoding process is completed almost entirely by the CPU itself.  For this test, the scores were compared with the ASUS A7N266-E test system.

Although the MSI had a slight advantage over the ASUS A7N266-E, both boards performed well.

Next we'll focus on OpenGL and DirectX performance and then get down to business with the Winstones.

More Quake 3, The Winstones & 3DMark2001