System setup and notes
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.- AMD Barton XP3200+ (11x200)
- AMD Athlon XP2700+ (13x166)
- Intel Pentium 4 3.00GHz HT S478 Northwood CPU (800FSB)
- EPoX 8RDA3+ nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboard (29/04/03 BIOS)
- Asus P4C800 Deluxe Canterwood
- Asus P4P800 Deluxe Springdale
- ABIT BH7 i845PE at 200FSB
- ABIT NF7-S v1.1
Common components
- ATi Radeon 9800 Pro (380/340)
- 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3500C2 run at 2-6-2-2 at DDR-400 for 8RDA3+, P4P800, P4C800, BH7, DDR-333 for NF7-S
- 41.5GB IBM 120GXP Hard Drive
- Liteon 16x DVD
- Samcheer 420w PSU
- Samsung 181T TFT monitor
- Akasa Silver Mountain cooler
- Cooler Master Fujiyama heatpipe cooler
Software
- Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
- DirectX9
- Intel 5.00.1012 chipset drivers
- NVIDIA nForce 2.03 drivers
- ATI CATALYST 3.2 drivers and control panel (6307s)
- Pifast v41 to 10m places
- Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end using U2's Pop album
- SiSoft SANDRA 2003 (9.43 release)
- Hexus SETI benchmark
- 3DMark 2001SE v330
- UT2003 Demo (Build 2206)
- Comanche 4 benchmark
- Serious Sam 2 Demo
- Quake 3 v1.30 HQ
Notes and issues
A couple of issues were encountered during testing. The first was the inability to reboot successfully after setting the board to Suspend To RAM (STR, S3). The 8RDA3+ would occasionally manage to boot back into the OS. The odds of this were less than 1/3. Secondly was the corruption that set in when using S-ATA drives on the Sil3112A controller. The latter grievance isn't directly EPoX's fault. It's got more to do with the interaction of the Silicon Image controller to the nForce2 chipset. Other than that, there were no problems or anomalies to report.
As this is the first official 200FSB AMD motherboard here at Hexus, we'll compare its performance to a couple of Intel's highfliers in the Springdale and Canterwood chipsets. A 3.0GHz P4 provides the brains of the outfit. To further demonstrate the gains that arise from a 2.2GHz/200FSB combination, we'll run an XP2700 on an ABIT NF7-S. The 33MHz CPU speed increase and the 33MHz FSB increase should bode well for performance, as should the extra 256kb of L2 cache. We'll add further nForce2 Ultra 400 boards as and when they're benchmarked.
Overclocking
200FSB running is a given with the Ultra moniker attached to this board. That said, a number of non-Ultra boards have hit 200FSB with ease. It's just that we now have an assurance from NVIDIA themselves. Finding the exact FSB limit took a while as we tested thoroughly from 200FSB upwards. The Vdd was raised to 1.8v and 3DMark was looped several times before a FSB was certified as stable. The final result ?. 223FSB with excellent stability.
230FSB was semi-stable with relaxed memory timings. We'd not like to use it for critical performance, though. The option of 2.0v Vdd is available in BIOS. We think that's a little too high without active cooling on the bridges, especially on a 24/7 basis. 223FSB isn't bad at all and correlates well with the maximum we can get out of the system memory with low latencies imposed. We've been spoilt a little by the 300FSB attained by certain Intel Canterwood boards. Remember that 223FSB is above average for a nForce2 chipset.
The benchmarks are calling our name.