Epox 5LDA+GLI Motherboard Review - Benchmarking
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Benchmarking
Running benchmarks on the Epox board I basically ran 2 sets of benchmarks, with the system at stock speeds and latency, and the system overclocked to what the system can run each test with full stability, for the true torture test I let my system run Need For Speed Underground 2 for a few hours, or I ran memory and CPU processing benchmarks error free for 3 hours, after that I ran some of my favorite benchmarks, Super PI to see how long my system takes to calculate PI up to 1 Million Integers, overclocking the processor and memory latency will show a significant increase in speed. Along with Super PI, I plan on benchmarking memory bandwidth with Sandra 2005; Of course I had to test 3d performance with 3dmark 2001 and 2003 and performance
Test Bed
- Pentium 4 520 processor 2.8GHz 3.06GHz and 3.5GHz
- EPoX 5LDA+GLI (119 MHz PCIe Frequency @ 250FSB)
- Patriot 1GB DDR2 kit, 667MHz 43312
- Gainward PCX5750 128MB (450/450)
- 500W Antec Smart Power
Results
After the initial results, I can say I am extremely impressed with the performance of the 5LDA+ at stock. The only limiting factor is, infact, overclocking, which is one of the items I was expecting the board to excel in.
The board allowed me to increase FSB up to 219FSB and not a single Mhz higher with PCI Express frequency set to Auto. In order to achieve stability at higher clock speeds, a bios update was needed at first. That brought stability up to 245Mhz with PCI express frequency set to Auto in bios. Further increasing FSB, I needed to increase my PCI express frequency as well as FSB. Basically for each additional 10 FSB I need to increase my PCIe frequency by 2mhz. Eventually these adjustments simply cause system instability in 3D applications, then eventually in all applications.
Overclocking shows a great improvement in PI calculations. The system calculates PI much faster, and this time can further be decreased by memory overclocking and tightening of memory latencies.
Here you can clearly see an increase in memory bandwidth. As the FSB is increased, memory latency and frequency and dividers will show significant increases or decrease in performance.
This is when we ran into the stability issue with the graphics card. I could not get my card to run while the CPU was over clocked to 3.5ghz, It would crash at the exact same point, the only thing that I can narrow the fault to was the PCI frequency which may need additional voltage to run 3D stable. With the updated bios, it ran up to 3.44 GHz, which gave the same results as 3.06 GHz.
Next: Conclusion >>
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