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The Test and
Results
The following are the hardware components we used in testing the boards:
It is unfortunate that we don’t have an available Socket 370 processor so the tests reflect only the performance based on a Slot-1 Celeron system. A clean install of Windows 98 was performed on freshly formatted hard disk and the latest drivers for the i740 and Voodoo2 cards installed before the benchmarks were ran, namely the Winstone 99 business application tests and respective timedemos of Quake2, Unreal, and Half-Life. However, during the Windows 98 installation for the P6BAT-A+, the video mode cannot be configured properly until the VIA AGP driver was installed, after which things ran smoothly. Each test was ran three times and the results averaged. The boards both performed well on the business applications test and similarly, in the gaming performance benchmarks. However, the Intel BX-based P6BXT-A+ maintained a lead of almost 2 Winstone 99 points, or faster by about 11.43 percent, over P6BAT-A+. This is a considerable lead especially considering that when the cpu was overclocked to 416 MHz—about one speed grade higher—the performance increase was only about one Winstone point higher. The performance hit is possibly due to the reported weakness of the VIA chipset in handling memory. The following are the test results:
Overclocking One word of warning to would be overclockers, Intel and other processor manufacturers do not encourage overclocking. If you accidentally fry your cpu while overclocking, you can kiss it goodbye. It is likely that your warranty would not be honored. For the uninitiated, overclocking—or making your processor run more than the officially-rated speed—can be achieved by either setting a higher bus speed (FSB) or a higher multiplier, or a combination of both. But since Intel has locked the multiplier on its newer processors, the remaining option for an overclocker is to set a higher bus speed. We managed to overclock the boards up to 416 MHz easily, just using the Jumperless BIOS setting to up the FSB to 83 MHz. However, both boards wouldn’t boot until we tweaked the BIOS setting, changing the UDMA setting of the IDE to PIO Mode 4. Setting the FSB to 100, the board would not even do the POST. At the 83 MHz and PIO Mode 4 setting, the boards booted and ran the Winstone 99 business tests and the game benchmarks without failing until all the tests are complete, meaning the board is stable enough at the overclocked speed. It is important to note that both of the P6BXT-A+ and P6BAT-A+ have "force 100mhz" jumper (jp4) on the board (beside the cpu slot) , which adds to the chances of overclocking success.
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