For comparison I have chosen the IC7-G from Abit, the P4C-800 from Asus and the PX856PE from Albatron. Both the Abit and Asus boards are also based on the 875 canterwood chipset. The CPU is a 3.0GHz Pentium 4. Memory was set to 1:1 with timings of CAS 2 5-2-2 at DDR400, courtesy of some OCZ Dual Channel Platinum Edition PC3200. I flashed the Soyo with the latest “overclocked BIOS” before testing.
First up every reviewers nightmare benchmark, Sysmark. It’s a great and easy to use package, but why oh why does it have to take so long to run =)
So far so good then, with just two marks separating the competition. This is certainly not anything you will notice in real world applications.
Unreal Tournament 2003 has become a bit of a defacto standard in a modern PC review, and I have chosen the subsystem dependant flyby benchmark, courtesy of the highly useful [H]ard|OCP benchmarking tool which you can grab here.
Again, not much to write home about here, all of the boards have no problem running UT2k3 and you won’t notice the difference in any real world test.
3DMark 2001SE is less of a benchmark and more a way of life for some people. Such people need to get out more.
The difference between the boards it once again very small, although the Soyo puts in an especially good showing in this test.
Sandra memory puts the Soyo neck and neck with the Abit and Albatron boards, although the Asus is a little quicker. Again it's only just outside a margin for error though.
I think that’s enough benchmarking, as usual the Soyo is right up there in performance. Let's take a look at some of the overclocking features and the BIOS.
