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Motherboards Compared: 865PE and 915P chipset for Socket 775

Motherboards/Intel S775 by JNav89GT @ 2005-01-06

Socket 775 has given the troubled Prescott Pentium4 a much needed shot in the arm. With better voltage regulation and a new socket interface, we have hope this will cure what ails the Prescott CPU. Today we look at two viable alternatives for those looking to get into socket 775, without having to sell of a kidney to finance the transition.

Test Setup/Benchmarks

JNav89GT's Test Setup 1: Chaintech 915VP
CPU	Intel P4 530 Retail-3.0GHz LGA 775
Memory	Centon C2x512PC3200LL - Timings of 2.5 3:3:8 used for all testing
Video Card	Gigabyte 5900PCX 128mb - overclocked and running at 400MHz core / 800MHz memory
Power Supply	Zippy 460W (PSL-6701P)

JNav89GT's Test Setup 2: Albatron PX865PE7 Pro
CPU	Intel P4 530 Retail-3.0GHz LGA 775
Memory	Mushkin Black Level II V2 2x512mb - Timings of 2.5 3:3:8 used for all testing
Video Card	Asus FX5900 128mb - clocked at default 400MHz core / 850MHz memory
Power Supply	Fortron 520W

Windows XP SP2 was running on both systems.

First a bit of explanation! I wanted to try to standardize equipment as much as possible across both platforms. Being that the Chaintech uses PCI express graphics, this limited me in which cards I could use, and still fairly cross compare to the Albatron which uses an AGP card. The best I could come up was with the NVIDIA 5900 series GPU's described above. While the GPU's are basically identical, they do differ in clock speeds and board design. The Gigabyte PCX5900 comes clocked much lower than the Asus FX5900, so I choose to overclock it to the highest stable speed I could, which came pretty close to being equal between the two. I hope this can provide a reasonable comparison regarding graphics performance. The system memories, while being from different brands, are both based on Samsung TCCD modules and should perform similarly given the same timings and frequency etc...

That said, the benches I chose concentrate on memory subsystem and graphics / 3D performance. While there are definite advantages of the ICH6 Southbridge found on the Chaintech board for SATA drives or PCI express peripherals (other than the video card), none were tested for this review, so data will not focus on this area. If you are an individual with a brand spanking new SATA II drive, or a SATA drive that supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ), the Chaintech would probably be the better choice, as the ICH6 supports this standard.

Benchmarks used:

SiSoft Sandra 2004

Cachemem

Everest Home Edition-Memory Read

PCMark 2004

Sciencemark Beta 2.0 Memory Bandwidth

Super Pi 1MB

3DMark 2001SE (build 220)

Doom3 800x600-Medium Quality

Far Cry 1.1 1024x768-High Details

So now that I've bored you to death, let's get on with the benching to see how these little beasts perform ->

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