Overclocking/System Setup

Overclocking results

We decided to run a different form of overclocking testing for this review. Rather than take a sample of CPU's and see how high we could clock them, we decided to test the motherboards' stability in high bus speed situations. Our previous tests focused more on stressing out the CPU, with these bus speed tests we're stressing out the motherboard and the components connected to it (system memory, AGP bus, etc.) a bit more.

With this in mind we grabbed our engineering sample Pentium III 933 and dialed in a safe 6.0 multiplier in the CUSL2 BIOS.

First we tried 150MHz FSB and ran through a few runs of Quake 3 and 3DMark 2000 with no problems. In fact, we successfully pushed the FSB all the way up to 160MHz (the max supported by the CUSL2 at the [133:133:30] ratio) with no problems.

Test System Setup

Intel Pentium III 750E

Abit BE6-II Motherboard
Abit SE6 Motherboard
ASUS CUSL2 Motherboard
MSI MS-6309 Motherboard

Mushkin PC133 High-Quality SDRAM

GeForce DDR reference card
Driver version Detonator 5.22

Western Digital Caviar 20GB ATA-66 Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE

Benchmarks
Winbench 99 1.1
CPUMark99
FPUMark
Business Disk Winmarks
High-End Disk Winmarks

SiSoft Sandra 99 5.10 CPU tests - Dhrystone, Whetstone, MMX, SSE, HD, CPU/memory, FPU/memory tests

Ziff Davis Winstone 99
Content Creation 2000

3DMark2000

Unreal Tournament - 640x480x32
Unreal Tournament - 800x600x32
Unreal Tournament - 1024x7680x32
Unreal Tournament - 1280x1024x32

Quake 3 Retail - 510x384 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 640x480 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 800x600 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1024x768 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1280x960 Fastest, Normal, High Quality

Notes

For this review we've rounded up our BX and Apollo Pro133A motherboards to compare against the CUSL2 and Abit SE6. All tests were run with the memory bus at 100MHz.