Benchmarks III
Unreal Tournament has always been a good indicator of just how much information a motherboard can push out. Even the flyby tests offer us a peek into useable bandwidth. Conducted with the in-built benchmark set to maximum. 1024x768x32, as always.
The old adage of 'you wouldn't know which board was which unless you spied the sticker' applies here. Of course, we hanker after the very highest performance our budget would allow, but when the performance deviation is not much more than 5% in the majority of memory-dependant benchmarks, you'll soon realise that the Springdale is a mighty fine chipset.
Our drag race of Quake III v1.30, Demo Four, High Quality, at 1024x768x32 finished it off.
Close again. The IS7 is a little slower than the IC7-G in almost every benchmark. We'd expect that given the Canterwood's famed Performance Acceleration Technology. We can also surmise that the ASUS Canterwood generally beats out the ABIT version by running a faster clock and FSB speed. What we're still having difficulty in explaining is the staggering performance of the ASUS Springdale.