Review: IWill P4HT-S i845PE

by Tarinder Sandhu on 21 November 2002, 00:00

Tags: IWILL

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Benchmarks II

Even though the Iwill is clocking our 2.8GHz CPU at 2793MHz, making it the slowest of the bunch, it has, thus far, shown excellent performance when compared to its DDR counterparts. Let's see if this can continue as we delve into the gaming benchmarks. Firstly, as always, 3DMark 2001SE. Run at 1024x768x32.

Not only does it keep parity with other DDR motherboards, it manages to eclipse them all in this sensitive benchmark. If you want to see a breakdown of how it achieved 14982 marks, click here.

Now on to Serious Sam 2, and the lovely Valley of the Jaguar Timedemo. I've benchmarked at Normal preferences to minimise the bottleneck that even a Radeon 9700 Pro will create with quality settings enabled.

Apart from the lacklustre performance exhibited by the VIA P4X400, the other DDR motherboards generally converge to 100FPS. 4 motherboards are separated by less than 1 FPS.

How about another system-taxing benchmark in Comanche 4. Benchmarked at 1024x768x32. Sound is disabled, as it is in all gaming benchmarks.

A similar story unfolds here. This is to be expected as all the DDR-equipped motherboards are running system memory at DDR333 speeds with the strictest timings possible.

Moving on the Unreal Tournament 2003's demo. I'm simply benchmarking the bot matches, as they've shown the greatest sensitivity to changes in motherboards and / or bandwidth.

Close once more. Lastly, we'll end with a run of Quake 3 Fastest. This simply highlights how well AGP implementation and bandwidth on offer are used.

RAMBUS, running at PC1066 speeds, takes the other chipsets to the proverbial cleaners. Still, 400FPS is mind-numbingly fast, even if this isn't a playable resolution. The Iwill proves how competent it is in gaming-related benchmarks.

Let's wrap it up now. This motherboard has certainly impressed on most fronts.