Determining overall performance levels for motherboards is a difficult proposition. All hardware and software must be kept absolutely consistent, right down to the driver revision level. For our hardware reference base, we have selected the Athlon XP 2100+ processor, along with 512-MB of Crucial PC2700 and a VisionTek GeForce4 Ti 4600. This gives us a pretty fair estimation of high-end components, as well as selecting hardware that is popular with the enthusiast buyer.
One area that needs to be addressed is the System BIOS options. We went into the performance testing with a requirement of utilizing the high-end features of each board, which translated into achieving the highest RAM timings possible. It also means that if a particular board does not include full DDR memory timings or other tweaking options, then it may inevitably suffer. We feel this strikes a good balance between a standard reference platform, and rewarding manufacturers for providing a robust System BIOS.
Of course, we do draw the line at bumping up the FSB at standard processor settings, or any other performance enhancing trickery. There are certain System BIOS options that do this very thing, as well as some selections that artificially increase system speeds. These have either been disabled or if needed, the actual FSB was selected manually (and confirmed via diagnostic software) to ensure an even playing field.
Our operating system choice is Windows XP Pro, and our benchmark list features a wide selection of system and game benchmarks. These include Business and Content Creation Winstone, SiSoft SANDRA 2002 and PCMark 2002, along with popular game tests like 3DMark 2001SE, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake 3, Comanche 4 and Jedi Knight II.
General Settings:
Desktop Resolution: 1024x768
Color Depth: 16-bit
V-Sync: Disabled
Processor: Athlon XP 2100+
Memory: 512 MB Crucial PC2700 DIMM (2x256)
NVIDIA reference drivers: 28.32
Video Card: VisionTek Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600
Hard-Drive: Western Digital 40GB 7200RPM ATA100
IDE Interface: Ultra ATA/100
Sound: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live
CD/DVD: LG 16X DVD-ROM
Power Supply: Sparkle 400 Watt
Operating System: Windows XP Pro
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