ABIT IS7 Motherboard Review - ABIT IS7 Motherboard Review

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BENCHMARKS

A motherboard in my opinion is always one of the more difficult things to accurately benchmark and know that the product we're reviewing, the motherboard, is actually the determining factor of the score.  What we've done to keep things as close as possible is take the exact same system and change out only the motherboard, and the CPU in one instance.  We'll be comparing this IS7 Springdale to a Canterwood motherboard, a FIC Springdale motherboard, and the older BH7 which features the i845PE chipset. 

For memory timing unless otherwise stated we used "SPD" settings to keep things on an even table.  Video card settings were set to performance.  Let's have a look at the test systems.

TEST SYSTEM 1

1. ABIT IS7 Motherboard (Featuring the i865PE "Springdale" Chipset)
2. Intel Pentium4 3.0GHz (c) CPU (w/800MHz FSB)
3. 2x256MB Sticks of EL DDR3200 OCZ Platinum Memory
4. 80GB Western Digital Special Edition Hard Drive
5. Radeon 9700 Pro Video Card
6. Remaining components should not have an effect on scores.

TEST SYSTEM 2

1. FIC VL11PE Motherboard (Featuring the i865PE "Springdale" Chipset)
2. Intel Pentium4 3.0GHz (c) CPU (w/800MHz FSB)
3. 2x256MB Sticks of EL DDR3200 OCZ Platinum Memory
4. 80GB Western Digital Special Edition Hard Drive
5. Radeon 9700 Pro Video Card
6. Remaining components should not have an effect on scores.

TEST SYSTEM 3

1. ABIT IC7-G Motherboard (Featuring the i875P "Canterwood" Chipset)
2. Intel Pentium4 3.0GHz (c) CPU (w/800MHz FSB)
3. 2x256MB Sticks of EL DDR3200 OCZ Platinum Memory
4. 80GB Western Digital Special Edition Hard Drive
5. Radeon 9700 Pro Video Card
6. Remaining components should not have an effect on scores

TEST SYSTEM 4

1. ABIT BH7 Motherboard (Featuring the i845PE Chipset)
2. Intel Pentium4 2.4Ghz (b) CPU @ 3Ghz (18 x 167Mhz FSB)
3. 2x256MB Sticks of EL DDR3200 OCZ Platinum Memory
4. 80GB Western Digital Special Edition Hard Drive
5. Radeon 9700 Pro Video Card
6. Remaining components should not have an effect on scores.

The reason we are throwing the 845 chipset into the mix, especially at the lower FSB albeit the same CPU speed, is that we think there's a good chance that this is what a lot of you will be looking to upgrade FROM to these new Springdale and Canterwood chipsets.

Let me tell you that in none of the benchmarks you are about to see was the on-board sound disabled.  This is for two reasons.  First and foremost, ABIT included on board sound so it only seems fair to benchmark it as packaged, and that's with the sound enabled.  The second reason is that I've never seen someone disable the sound in a game to get better performance while gaming.  For a video card review?  Sure we'll disable the sound to show raw performance.  For a motherboard review you get what they send us.

SiSoft Sandra 2003 OCA Edition

CPU Arithmetic  Bench

What we see here is simply put the highest marks we've seen to day, which it should be as this is the fastest CPU money can currently buy. We see a very small drop off from the Canterwood to the Springdale chipsets. So far so good. 

Multimedia Bench

Here oddly enough we see a a pretty close race again, with performance falling direcly in line with price. As much as we like to get bang for our buck, we can't complain a great deal when performance closely matches the price curve. 

Benchmarking continued next page...

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