915 Motherboard Roundup: Socket 775 for the Rest of Us
by Wesley Fink on December 7, 2004 12:25 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
DirectX 8 & Open GL Gaming Performance
The same pattern of Asus, Epox and ECS at the top of the charts continues in DX8 and Open GL gaming. These 3 boards continue to land at or near the top in all the older game benchmarks. After many months of seeing the tight clustering of Athlon 64 scores, it is interesting to see the true impact of off-chip memory controllers on performance. This is not necessarily a good thing, since the on-CPU memory controller has made A64 performance very consistent across the same CPU on virtually any A64 chipset. Here, with the memory controller in the chipset, we are seeing much more variation in performance depending on the quality of the board design itself. This is true, even though all boards are using the same Intel 915 chipset.
As in the 925X, we were again surprised to see the very average performance of the DFI UT 915P-T12 at stock speeds. We are beginning to see the DFI as achieving some of its incredible overclocking powers because it is starting at a rather unimpressive performance level at stock speeds. Before you jump to conclusions here, compare the DFI results to the Asus P5GD2. The Asus is extremely fast at stock speeds - in fact, the fastest board in the roundup - but it is also an incredible overclocker. The Asus both starts fast and ends fast.
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coldpower27 - Tuesday, December 7, 2004 - link
Of course the Pentium 4 560 is gonna be outperformed, The Pentium 4 560 is designed to compete at the 417US price point while the Athlon FX 55 is designed for the 827US, were talking double the P4 560 in price. i believethe closest competitor for the Pentium 4 560 in price is probably the Athlon 64 3700+ even though it is on Single Channel DDR.danidentity - Tuesday, December 7, 2004 - link
Even the 3800+ could be included, but that is still about $180 more expensive than the 560, according to Newegg.danidentity - Tuesday, December 7, 2004 - link
I know comments like I'm about to make have been made before, and I am not biased, but I wanted to reiterate.Why is the FX-55 even part of the benchmarks in this review? Why not a 3500+? The FX-55 is TWICE the price of the Pentium 560 according to current Newegg prices.
I know the argument will be that the FX-55 and the 560 are two of the highest performing chips from the two camps. But the fact of the matter is that most people shopping for a 560 aren't going to be shopping for a FX-55. It's in an entirely different class.
mongoosesRawesome - Tuesday, December 7, 2004 - link
Can you do a comparison between soundstorm and dolby digital live? What is the bitrate of the encoding? Frequency range? Overall quality?It seems like this may be the second time I pass on AC3 encoding though. Last time I chose a northwood platform over AMD and NF2, and this time I'll likely choose the NF4 over intel and dolby digital live.
Would be nice to be able to easily hook it up to my klipsch dolby digital decodor though...
anandtechrocks - Tuesday, December 7, 2004 - link
Thanks for the great review!MAME - Tuesday, December 7, 2004 - link
AMD >>>>>>>>>>>>> *