System setup and notes
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.- Intel Pentium 4 3.00GHz HT S478 Northwood CPU (800FSB)
- AMD Barton XP3
Common components
- ATi Radeon 9800 Pro (380/340)
- 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3500C2 run at 2-6-2-2 at DDR-400 for
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 (9.4
Notes and issues
Not so much of an issue as an observation here. The board often took a few seconds to get going once the power button was depressed. It always booted at any stable frequency without fail, it's just that there was often a lull between ignition (so to speak) and power. The board had no problems with all 4 DIMM slots filled and reasonably aggressive timings, though. We installed the IS7 into a regular Lian Li PC60 case without problems, and operating system installation was a non-event. A few days' use will not provide us with the kind of stability testing we'd like, although hammering the board with various benchmarks should show any engineering weakness. From a reviewer's point of view it's always satisfying to leave a board under pressure for 24 hours and see it pass without apparent strain. We expect nothing short of perfect stability given that the PC market is so mature now, ABIT don't disappoint.Benchmarking isn't a perfectly exact science. The natural variations between benchmarking runs puts paid to that. What further differentiates boards based on similar chipsets is the speed at which they're run at. You'd think that a 3GHz / 800FSB P4 would run at exactly 3GHz, wouldn't you ?. That's not the case with inflated motherboard FSBs. Our test boards run at the following speeds.
3030.2MHz - ASUS P4C800 Deluxe and ASUS P4P800 Deluxe
3007.52MHz - ABIT IC7-G and IS7
2205.3MHz - EPoX 8RDA3+ (AMD Barton 3200)
FSB Overclocking
Our semi-unlocked 3.0GHz P4 allows us to select a 12x multiplier. With decent CPU voltage present we have the scope to test up until 300FSB. First stop was 250FSB. No problems here. The odd instability presented itself at ~ 280FSB. We'd certainly not complain at a 40% FSB overclock with stock cooling.
The benchmarks were conducted with the shipping IS7_10 BIOS. We found that ABIT subsequently released a performance BIOS for the Canterwood boards. We fully expect the same to occur with the Springdale variants. On to the testing.