For all benchmarks the Albatron board was tested at 133/166 (asynchronous RAM requires PC2700 or better). For comparison it comes up against the Epox 8K3A+ Athlon platform (XP2100+) and another P4 board, the SiS645 based Epox 4SDA+. Soyo.
First Up, everybody's favourite benchmark, 3DMark 2001. 3Dmark uses DirectX technology and tests all aspects of system performance including the CPU, memory bandwidth, AGP and the graphics card. As you can see the Intel chipset based Pentium 4 board is quicker in this test, virtue of its quicker AGP bus. Nonetheless the boards are closely matched, with the XP2100+ also putting in a good showing.
Sisoft Sandra 2002 pro is one of the most valuable benchmarking suites available since it has the facilities to test almost every aspect of a system's performance. In the arithmetic tests, the slight variation between the two P4 boards can be attributed to non-identical FSB speeds. The XP2100+ is very strong in arithmetic scores, coming within 49 points of the Epox P4 system. Multimedia is a different matter, with the P4s dominating. The Albatron seems faster than the SiS based board, and by no small margin. I can't really explain the large differences to be honest.
The SiS based boards usually come out stronger than the 845 boards in these tests, but this is not the case. Whether Albatron have particularly aggressive memory timings, or Intel have really hooked up their new 845G / chipset driver combination I don't know, but the scores are very impressive. Both P4 systems beat the XP2100+ by over 20% in this benchmark.
PCMark is a new benchmark from MadOnion. Although it seems a little ambiguous, it does provide reproducible and accurate results - at least when comparing the same platform. I have only given the memory results because the others are less important for motherboard reviews. The P4s run away with this benchmark with a massive margin - over 35%. It has been mentioned that PCMark is Intel Biased however. We won't even mention the difference in CPU benchmarks.... [gulp]
Codecreatures is arguably the finest looking benchmark out there, with graphics that put even 3DMarks nature test to shame. Truly bringing any PC to its knees, the results of this one shows just how dependent on the graphics subsystem it is, although the benchmark seems to make at least some use of the P4s 533MHz quad-pumped bus.
Comanche 4 is a popular benchmark among hardware sites, and it sure taxes even the most L337 of PCs. Personally I have never seen an example of such pathetic coding, how can a game that runs at under 40fps with a 2100XP and GeForce 4 Ti-4600 look like a 3 year old title? I remember Novalogics F-16 and MiG-29 3dfx-glide flight Sims from a few years back, and they looked WAY better than Comanche 4. The two P4 platforms again o\/\/n the XP2100 in this test, the margin up to 21%, with the Albatron pushing ahead once again.
