Lost speed with P4PE

[jakesnake]

Hopefully you folks can give me some insight on a recent situation
that's got me perplexed.
I was running a Celeron 1.7 on an Abit SA7 and getting about 6500 on
3DMark2001 SE with an ATI 8500LE, 64mb DDR. Some problems started
showing up a couple of weeks ago, and after long intensive
troubleshooting I finally figured out that the Abit had a problem.
The only Intel mobo I had around (I usually build AMD machines) was an
ASUS P4PE that I had earmarked for a P4 2.4 I'm supposed to build
tomorrow for someone. I rebuilt the Celeron with it and all went
fine. After several hours of Prime95 and Sandra on the ASUS, it
appears that the SA7 was indeed my problem. However, the thing that's
got me bewildered is that my benchmark scores have dropped
dramatically, approximately 1000 points in 3DMark. I've downloaded
and installed the latest Intel 845 update utilities, and the AGP is
set to 4x in bios, and reads 4x in all the utilities I've run. The
ATI drivers are the same, the RAM is the same, etc. I even oc'ed the
cpu to 2.0gb and only reached 5508 in 3DMark.
Am I missing something on this board, or is the P4PE a sub-standard
motherboard?
Thanks for any help.

jakesnake

 

[Paul]

Hopefully you folks can give me some insight on a recent situation
that's got me perplexed.
I was running a Celeron 1.7 on an Abit SA7 and getting about 6500 on
3DMark2001 SE with an ATI 8500LE, 64mb DDR. Some problems started
showing up a couple of weeks ago, and after long intensive
troubleshooting I finally figured out that the Abit had a problem.
The only Intel mobo I had around (I usually build AMD machines) was an
ASUS P4PE that I had earmarked for a P4 2.4 I'm supposed to build
tomorrow for someone. I rebuilt the Celeron with it and all went
fine. After several hours of Prime95 and Sandra on the ASUS, it
appears that the SA7 was indeed my problem. However, the thing that's
got me bewildered is that my benchmark scores have dropped
dramatically, approximately 1000 points in 3DMark. I've downloaded
and installed the latest Intel 845 update utilities, and the AGP is
set to 4x in bios, and reads 4x in all the utilities I've run. The
ATI drivers are the same, the RAM is the same, etc. I even oc'ed the
cpu to 2.0gb and only reached 5508 in 3DMark.
Am I missing something on this board, or is the P4PE a sub-standard
motherboard?
Thanks for any help.

jakesnake

Well, I looked in Google, and I think the SA7 uses the 645DX Northbridge.
This is equivalent to a Asus P4S533 (saves me the time of finding and
downloading the SA7 manual).

The Celeron is a 100MHz x 4 = 400MHz Quad pumped FSB.

Consulting the P4S533 manual, a CPU frequency of 100MHz can have a DIMM
frequency of 166MHz (by jumper at least), so this means DDR333 rates
for memory are possible.

From a table of frequencies I copied and posted a while ago, a FSB of
100MHz on the P4PE offers only DDR200 and DDR266 as memory options.
So, that could account for some difference. The other difference might
be whatever memory timings the two motherboards used at those different
memory clock rates. Little things like "aggressive" or "turbo" and the
like could also skew things.

P4PE options:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&[email protected]&rnum=3

Bottom line, you cannot expect every piece of hardware to be good with
every other piece of hardware. Some purchasing choices for processors
will give better value for money than others. In this case, if you
look at the P4PE now, with a BIOS update it can take a FSB800 processor
and use just one stick of DDR400 memory. I think if you did that, you'd
see a slightly better figure Can an SA7 take a FSB800 processor ?
So, maybe the SA7 (or a P4S533 for that matter) get better mileage
using a Celeron, whereas the sweet spot for the P4PE lies elsewhere.

Not that I really care about benchmarks or brands for that matter -
for me being able to control/configure the product and have it operate
24/7 without crashing is what counts. This is one of the reasons I've
never bothered to even benchmark my disk drives - cause my data is still
there and read/writes finish... eventually

HTH,
Paul