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BIOS
I actually setup this board three different times in all
of the benchmarking madness, and all three times I forgot to take pictures
of the BIOS (Jim is going to shoot me). Rest assured, it is a normal Award
BIOS with more settings than you can shake a stick at. You have your choice
over a wide array of memory settings (timing, speed, CAS, ECC, etc) and
you can enable/disable all of the onboard peripherals as well as all of
the more "normal" BIOS stuff. It's pretty refreshing to see
all those options on a high-end server board like this one, but like always,
I set it to "Optimized Defaults" for testing purposes.
Test System Configurations
I changed up some of the benchmarks a bit as some of the
ones we were using were getting dated. Wherever possible I compared as
many systems as I could, but by changing to some newer benchmarks I limited
myself in some of the tests. Although we don't get to compare as many
machines this time out, looking forward I think it was a good move. The
systems as tested were as follows:
| |
i860 Platform |
E7500 Platform(s) |
MPX Platform |
| CPU(s) |
Intel Xeon 2.4ghz
(x2) |
Intel Xeon 2.4ghz
(x2) |
AMD Athlon MP
1.8ghz/2200+ (x2) |
| Motherboard |
Iwill DP400 |
Tyan Tiger i7500
MSI E7500 Master LS |
MSI K7D Master
L |
| Chipset |
Intel i860 |
Intel E7500 |
AMD 760MPX |
| Memory |
512mb Kingston
PC800 ECC RDRAM (2x 256mb) |
512mb Crucial
PC2100 Reg'd ECC (2x 256mb) |
512mb Crucial
PC2100 Reg'd ECC (2x 256mb) |
| Storage |
WD 1000JB "SE" |
WD 1000JB "SE" |
WD 1000JB "SE" |
| OS |
WinXP Pro SP1 |
WinXP Pro SP1 |
WinXP Pro SP1 |
Hyperthreading was enabled for all tests
(even though we've shown it
isn't always the best idea) as was ECC. All BIOS' were set to "Optimized
Defaults" whenever possible.
Benchmarks
I stuck to the standard suite of 2CPU benchmarks
this time, with a few notable exceptions. Jim and I recently experienced
some problems with CliBench in our benchmarking runs, so I decided to
leave it out this time around. I updated SiSoft Sandra to the latest "Professional"
version which added a new test (more on that later), and I added Cachemem
to the regular mix. Other than that, everything else is the same as it
has been... DivX, MPEG1, LAME, etc. They're all there.
You'll probably notice that the numbers for
this review are identical to the ones I'll be using in my Tyan Tiger i7500
review. Since both boards are based on the E7500 chipset and both test
machines contained the exact same hardware, I figured it would be interesting
to see how they compared. Plus I didn't feel like making all the same
graphs twice ;-)
Sandra >>
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