Benchmarks III
Let's now turn our attention to gaming to see how the MSI performs. We'll first benchmark MadOnion's 3DMark 2000 at its default resolution of 1024x768x16. I still feel that this benchmark is relevant today as many games still run under DX7 or earlier versions of DirectX.
The same trend continues in the first of the gaming benchmarks, decent performance at 100FSB but dropping away at 133FSB to the extent that the lower bandwidth SiS645DX (166MHz vs. 177MHz) is just able to eclipse it in the benchmarks. I wonder if things will change in 3DMark 2001SE, the more complex DX8.1 benchmark.
Here we see some position swapping from our protagonists, but not to any great degree. Although the performance-biased ABIT IT7 MAX holds a 200+ mark gap over the MSI 845E Max2 BLR, the difference is just 2%. You would never be able to the difference visually.
Let's now have a look at the bandwidth-hungry Valley of the Jaguar benchmark contained within the publicly available edition of Croteam's excellent first person shooter, Serious Sam 2. Settings are 1024x768x32 Normal preferences.
This demo is purely dictated by bandwidth. The increased geometry that ensues from a large, open 3D space, coupled with a Geforce4 Ti 4600 graphics card, ensures that the CPU and memory subsystems are kept extremely busy, bandwidth is king in this instance. Just remember that the bottom three scores are all at 1600MHz (100FSB) and the upper three at 2133MHz (133FSB) to illustrate how they perform at different FSBs.