System Setup and Notes

Hardware and Software

Test Platforms

	ECS 915-A System	ASUS P5AD2-E System
Processor(s)	Intel Pentium 4 570J
Mainboard	*ECS 915-A*	ASUS P5AD2-E
Memory	2 x 512MB Crucial Ballistix DDR2-667 3.0-3-3-10 @ 533MHz
BIOS Version	08.00.11 - 29th November 2004	1002.005 - 22nd October 2004
Disk Drive	74GB Western Digital Raptor
Graphics Card	NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra - PEG16X - 71.20 ForceWare
Operating System	Windows XP Professional, SP2
Mainboard Software	Intel INF Update Utility 6.3.0.1007

Benchmark Software

HEXUS.in-house Cryptography Benchmark
HEXUS Pifast Benchmark
ScienceMark 2.0 (7th February 2005)
Realstorm 2004
Cinebench 2003
HEXUS.in-house MP3 Encoding Benchmark using LAME 3.96
PicColor 32-bit v4.0
Kribibench v1.1.9

FutureMark's 3DMark05

Notes

The 915-A, initially benchmarked back in January with my old test suite, had to be returned to in late February for some more photography (I'd stupidly deleted all my photographs of the 915-A, thinking they were 915P-A shots) and it was subjected to my new platform test suite at the same time, to make it easier for me to find comparison numbers in the future. A little HEXUS.history trivia, it was therefore the first mainboard to be subjected to the new test suite, purely because I was stupid.

Its opposition is stern: ASUS's feature-filled P5AD2-E Premium, based on 925XE, provides the fight. The GMA900 hardware was disabled throughout and DDR2 memory was used during testing.

3DMark05 was used to check if the two lanes of PCI Express the graphics card was connected to were holding back performance, compared to the full 16 lanes that the 6800 Ultra enjoyed in the ASUS board. The results might surprise you. The 6800 boards I have on AGP don't work in the 915-A, with leads on nicely to the question of support for the AGP Express and PCI Express Lite slots.

There's not a PCI Express graphics card in my possession that fails to negotatiate a 2X link width on the 915-A, and work correctly, despite requesting 16 lanes when the board initialises. In that sense, and the collection of cards covers everything from Radeon X600 to GeForce 6200 TurboCache, right the way up to 6800 Ultras and X850 XT PEs, you don't really need to do your homework to check what the board supports in terms of PCI Express graphics.

However, more than a few AGP boards, including all my NV40-based 6800s, a 6600 GT on AGP using the BR2 bridge, and a Quadro FX 4000, refused to work on the 915-A. That's at odds with the 915P-A, where 6800 GT on AGP ran perfectly well. It appears the 915-A needs a BIOS update to bring the AGP Express support in line with what the 915P-A enjoys. An old Radeon 9200 SE was the first AGP board I could find that ran on the 915-A. Unfortunately, that doesn't have a PCI Express equivalent that I have to hand.

As I showed in the review of the 915P-A, the AGP Express port doesn't offer up leading AGP performance For the upgrader, it would nice for the board to support the vast majority of boards, to aid in upgrade endeavours.