P4X266 Motherboard Comparison December 18, 2001 Tuan 'Solace' Nguyen

Introduction

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One chipset, two boards

When we think of roundups, we think of an article that takes a look at many different products that exists the same category. In that case, a two-motherboard roundup would somewhat be an oxymoron. Even before talking about anything remotely technical, the size of this comparison is a serious indication of how low key P4X266 based boards are on the market. You’ll likely have a difficult time finding a P4X266 motherboard, and an even tougher time finding a board from your favorite motherboard manufacturer such as Abit, Asus, Giga-byte, Leadtek (yes, they make motherboards now), MSI and Supermicro.

If you’re the least bit familiar with Intel, you’ll know that it almost always coordinates technology releases with its partners. Intel will always want to release its version of a certain technology, before allowing others to follow. For example, the i845 chipset is the first SDR chipset for the Pentium 4. If other chipset manufacturers want to make their own P4 SDR chipset, they can do that, but they must announce and release after Intel. Going ahead of Intel at its own game can bring serious and sometimes deadly (in a business sense anyway) consequences. This is the fate that met the P4X266 chipset from VIA.

Follow the leader

Intel’s plans were to first release i845 SDR, which it did with good success mainly in the professional market. The primary reason for bringing out a P4 platform that is a heavy underperformer was to encourage customers to move from Pentium 3 or competing Athlon systems to P4 systems. Once it determines that enough users are using P4 processors, Intel will deploy the i845 DDR chipset. The new chipset is identical to current the i845 in virtually every manner except that it supports DDR RAM while the current i845 is limited to SDR RAM.

Currently, there’s only a handful of motherboard companies producing products based on VIA’s P4X266 chipset. Most large motherboard companies with tight relationships with Intel have retreated from going the P4X266 route and instead have made boards based on Intel’s i845 chipset. Smaller companies like ECS, Shuttle and Tyan went ahead and produced P4X266 motherboard regardless of what Intel has said simply because their market share is not significantly large enough for Intel to care. If for example Intel wanted to stop a company like Shuttle from producing P4X266 boards, its P4X266 products would make up for less than 1% of the world’s P4 chipsets – hardly a threat to Intel, even by the closest definition.

In the light of that, today we’re looking at offerings from Shuttle and Tyan, both very competitive products and both now available in the market.

SIDEBAR: We hate to tell you this but, VIA will soon introduce a new P4X chipset and other manufacturers will release their own P4 DDR chipsets too. Soon after, more new things will come. The upgrade insanity has no signs of stopping.

P4X Brief

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Born to be DDR

Compared to the i845 SDR chipset from Intel, the P4X266 is in a much better position to offer raw bandwidth for enthusiasts and gamers. Because the P4 relies on a quad pumped 100MHz/64-bit bus, it needs a memory bus that’s able to provide approximately 3.2GB/sec of data to perform at its peak. Realistically, standard PC133 SDRAM modules are only able to provide about 1.0GB/sec of usable bandwidth.

If only RDRAM came as cheap as DDR RAM is, there would be many more P4 users out there today, and those users would have speedier systems too. Natively, the P4 fits best with PC800 RDRAM because that’s what Intel had in its drawing plans when designing the P4. At 800MHz, PC800 RDRAM is able to offer the P4 3.2GB/sec. of bandwidth – perfectly matching the P4’s bus to the memory bus. If AMD had its way, and if RDRAM modules were cheap, the Athlon platform might be using RDRAM too.

Alas, we all know this isn’t the case. Hindered by poor execution, high manufacturing costs, and legal troubles galore, Rambus was unable to provide cheap RAM en mass. Intel resorted to bundling RDRAM along with its P4 processors just to get the platform moving along, and at speeds uncomfortably slow to what Intel is normally use to. VIA, not one to sit around and play Frisbee with wafers, sought to bring an affordable, high-bandwidth solution to the market. Thus they created the P4X266 chipset.

Kind of like Gabriel vs. Yu-law

Back in our i845 coverage, we noted that while the i845 was released as a chipset supporting only PC100 and or PC133 SDRAM, it internally was already hardwired to support PC1600/2100 DDR RAM. The i845 enjoys native support for DDR RAM by having a write cache directly on the chipset die. This enables it to write information extremely fast into the P4. Along with a L3-like write cache, the i845 also had deep buffers which keep data flowing at peak performance and eliminates spikes and valleys in data flow. Data is kept flowing to the P4 smoothly, and frequently used data is moved to the P4 even faster.

All the above features are useful when high-bandwidth memory like PC2100 DDR RAM is used. Because PC2100 is fast, the memory bus needs to be just as fast to keep up with the RAM. The key is to eliminate as many bottlenecks as possible without creating new ones and the trick is to make all buses as fast as possible, close to the fastest bus in the chain, but not exceeding it. If any of the buses speeds past the fastest bus (in this case, the P4’s 3.2GB/sec data bus), then the fastest bus becomes the new bottleneck, and further optimizations will yield little benefit.

The P4X266 comes with similar enhancements that are seen in the i845 chipset, but natively supported DDR RAM when it was released. While not as fast as PC800 RDRAM, PC2100 does hold its own, especially when dealing with latency. At 266MHz, PC2100 is able to provide 2.1GB/sec. – short of what PC800 can do, but nevertheless, rarely will the P4 bus be saturated 100% of the time.

SIDEBAR: Gabriel and Yu-law were two characters (against each other) that Jet Li played as in his latest movie The One. Some thought it was good and others thought it was downright horrible. After talking to the later half, I found out that most of them weren’t aware of the real life theories – like Albert Einstein’s theory that if you use 100% of your brain, you’re pure energy – that were present in the movie.

The Motherboards

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The motherboards and their features

We’re taking a close look at Shuttle’s AV40-R and Tyan’s Trinity 510 boards. ECS had sent us a board to test as well, but it turned out to be an i845, and couldn’t resubmit a P4X266 based board in time for the roundup.

Boards and Specifications
	PCI/CMR	ATX12V Required	Onboard audio	Bus Tweak	Voltage Tweak	RAID	LAN
Shuttle AV40-R	5/0	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Tyan Trinity 510	5/0	No	No (optional)	Yes	No	No	No (optional)

The Shuttle AV40-R is definitely the more featured-filled motherboard in this comparison, although Tyan does offer a different skew of the Trinity 510 with onboard audio (by chipset codec) and LAN using an Intel 100 controller. The AV40-R’s onboard audio is also using the chipset codec instead of utilizing one of the few available hardware options like the C-Media controllers commonly found on boards from Asus and Iwill. Although not an Audigy killer by any means, the C-Media 6-channel solutions are actually very good if you play lots of games but don’t listen to much music, or you listen to music but don’t like paying through your nose for high-end PC speakers. Often times, you’ll actually get better audio by going with better speakers than by going with a better sound card.

We generally don’t like anything onboard and most definitely if it’s onboard audio. This is because most solutions are just hard coded codecs that are processed by the host CPU and take up precious CPU cycles. There will always be those who won’t mind either way, simply because today’s processors are fast enough that most onboard codecs don’t show noticeable performance hits.

Been Speeding?

Both boards come equipped with overclocking options but the Tyan Trinity 510 is very limited in options compared to the Shuttle. Both boards come with FSB and clock multiplier settings but the Shuttle AV40-R comes with all that and options for tweaking voltage for practically all facets of the motherboard. Interesting to note is that the Award BIOS for P4X266 boards only allow you to adjust clock multiplier 3 bins above the actual setting. For example, both the AV40-R and the Trinity 510 only allowed us to set a maximum of 23X for our 2GHz P4 CPU. If you’re using a 1.5GHz CPU, you’ll be locked at 18X max. While this may first seem a little disappointing to some, it’s worth noting that 3 full bin jumps is quite large for the P4 and you’ll almost always be more successful tinkering with FSB settings.

Not leaving anything to spare, Shuttle also includes a Promise UltraATA/100 RAID controller with the AV40-R. For those who don’t yet know, the Promise RAID controllers are also capable of acting as standard IDE controllers. We’ve seen a few sites document that the onboard Promise RAID solution – and other Promise RAID controllers for that matter – is capable only of RAID-enabled operation. This is not true, as there’s a specific way of setting up your drives to have the RAID controller “act” as all purpose IDE controller. If you have more than one hard drive attached to the RAID controller, simply set each drive to a different RAID mode. For example, set HD1 to mirroring mode and HD2 to striping mode. Since the two modes are incompatible with each other, they will simply function in standard UltraATA mode. The same trick goes for DVD, CD-ROM and other drives.

SIDEBAR: Overclocking on a Tyan board? After talking with Tyan, it seems that it will include overclocking features on most of its boards for the foreseeable future (and it’s about time)!

Shuttle AV40-R

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Getting Competitive

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Tyan Trinity 510

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More than just stability this time

Getting there, but still corporate

Users, who purchase Tyan products, generally are after one thing – stability. They know that Tyan tends to sacrifice extra features such as audio and IDE RAID to ensure that its boards stay rock solid. The more components you add onto a motherboard, the more likely that there will be a conflict or compatibility issue. VIA is only beginning to show its customers that it can design stable chipsets so it’s best for a company with such focused market like Tyan to stick to tried and true technology. While we’re not saying that the P4X266 is an unstable chipset, its relatively low memory compatibility is something we would like to see go away.

While our board doesn’t come with anything to flaunt, we can tell by the silk screen that there are areas that are reserved for extra components. With different board skews, you’re able to get boards that have onboard audio and 100Mbit/sec LAN. One feature we do love about the Trinity 510 is the fact that it doesn’t require a P4 power supply (ATX12V spec) to operate successfully. During our tests with a standard ATX 2.03 power supply, the Trinity 510 survived with flying colors, even with fully loaded PCI and memory slots.

SIDEBAR: It could have been that the Trinity 510 had a loose soldering spot somewhere and the heat reconnected the gap. Tyan tells us it hasn’t received any calls for similar situations with the board.

System Setup

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Test System Setup

Intel Pentium 4 2GHz

Asus P4T-E
Asus P4B
Shuttle AV40-R
Tyan Trinity 510

256MB PC2100 Crucial DDR SDRAM
256MB PC800 Samsung RDRAM

NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti500 64MB
Driver version Detonator 23.11

20GB Western Digital Caviar ATA/100 Hard drive
Toshiba 10X DVD-ROM

Windows 2000 Professional, SP2
DirectX 8.0a

Desktop resolution: 800x600x16

Benchmarks

SYSMark 2001

3DMark 2001 - 640x480x32
3DMark 2001 - 800x600x32
3DMark 2001 -1024x768x32

Business Winstone 2001
Content Creation 2001

Quake 3 Retail 640x480 High Quality
Quake 3 Retail 800x600 High Quality
Quake 3 Retail 1024x768 High Quality

Serious Sam Retail - 640x480x16 Normal
Serious Sam Retail - 800x600x16 Normal
Serious Sam Retail - 1024x768x16 Normal

SIDEBAR: Bob came back recently and I just met him for the first time last Saturday at Fry's. We talked for a while there at the GXP tournament. He still doesn't know my name.

Content Creation

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SYSMark 2001

Analysis

Performance between the Shuttle and Tyan boards are virtually indistinguishable in terms of real life usage. You definitely will not notice that one board is slower or faster than the other board. While the P4X266 is not as fast as an i850 based platform, it still holds up very nicely. These days, bandwidth is everything and the cream of the crop for bandwidth is still the i850 chipset using PC800 RDRAM. With the release of PC2700 DDR RAM, the performance gap is closing rapidly.

The i845 platform loses quite badly to both the P4X266 and the i850 because of its slow SDRAM. We should be seeing a nice boost from Intel’s new i845 DDR chipset.

Content Creation Winstone 2001

Analysis

All the boards in this stack up well with each other in this bench. The P4X266 even takes over the i850 platform by a small margin. Both the Trinity 510 and the AV40-R stay relatively close with the Trinity 510 falling just a bit behind; again, not a significant difference by any means.

Business Winstone 2001

Analysis

Not much excitement going on in this test. Shuttle is taking an expected lead so far as it has never been Tyan’s forte to concentrate on tweaking its boards for maximum performance.

SIDEBAR: I recently just bought a PlayStation2 and Metal Gear Solid 2. This is primarily why I haven’t been around much. Luckily it wasn’t Final Fantasy X, or I would have been fired!

3DMark2001

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3DMark2001

Analysis

Shuttle is definitely showing that it can produce a high performance board regardless of what the community may think about its products. A significant amount of bandwidth is being used with rendering 3D scenes in real time and the i850 RDRAM platform shows that DDR needs to mature much more before it can pose a serious threat in terms of performance.

Recently, RDRAM prices have dropped significantly – all RAM for that matter – so P4 performance junkies may find a better home with an i850 platform, which isn’t looking so aloof anymore.

Benchmarks like Quake 3 and 3DMark relies heavily on graphics performance as well as CPU power so depending on your configuration, you may not see the high numbers that we see here. Both the Trinity 510 and the AV40-R would make good gaming platforms. Their performance is very respectable compared to an RDRAM solution and never really fall far behind. You may find better options with i850 boards simply because there are very few manufacturers producing P4X266 boards.

The price difference between a top end i850 motherboard and a similarly equiped P4X266 motherboard could stretch to $40 in some instances, making a P4X266 board a viable alternative to an i850 solution - especially since the performance between the two systems are negligible.

SIDEBAR: If you've played Metal Gear Solid 2, some of the special effects in that game cannot be reproduced even on a GeForce3.

Gaming Performance

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Quake 3 Arena Retail

Analysis

The i850 here eclipses its competition easily in Quake 3 but at this speed, it’s hard to tell the difference. Strangely the i845 platform stacks up quite well with the P4X266 platform. This is likely due to the fact that Quake 3 is more graphics performance, AGP bandwidth and CPU dependant than it is memory bandwidth.

Serious Sam

Analysis

While both Quake 3 and Serious Sam use OpenGL to render graphics, Serious Sam doesn’t scale as well as Quake 3 does. This goes to show that code and engine optimizations go a very long way in performance. Someone who only plays Serious Sam and never plays Quake 3 would likely think their system performs relatively poor because they’ve been hearing how other similarly equipped systems dish out far more frames than theirs in Quake 3. It’s best to try a variety of games on a system before making final judgment.

Again, there’s not much difference between the two P4X266 boards and in reality, we didn’t feel a difference between any of the boards.

SIDEBAR: Final Fantasy X should be in stores by the time you read this, or the day after. Go get a copy if you have a PlayStation2 – you won’t regret it.

Conclusion

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FiringSquad Says

The Pentium 4 platform is has come a long way from where it started but it still has yet a longer road to travel. The introduction of DDR is just the tip of the iceberg for the P4. Just recently, Intel announced the new i845D chipset for the P4, giving it official DDR support from Intel. From what we’ve seen however, the i845D needs to mature before it can seriously compete with the likes of Intel’s own i850, the VIA P4X266 and SiS’ 645 chipset.

Both Tyan and Shuttle have produced good boards with a mixed set of features and performance. Shuttle’s AV40-R takes a bit of a lead above the Tyan due to support for IDE RAID but serious users will really appreciate the Trinity 510’s 4 DIMM slots. During our tests, the Trinity 510 also worked with more memory modules and the list is slowly growing. Depending from where you’re coming from, one of these boards will suite you better. For the gamer out there looking for a P4X266 platform, we recommend the Shuttle AV40-R because of the extra RAID-enabled IDE channels. Different skews of the AV40-R also come with USB2.0 for extremely fast file transfers.

By now, we all know that Tyan makes no-frills motherboards for the average consumer. In fact, gamers ought to look for motherboards from manufacturers other than Tyan. For the power user and hardware enthusiast though, Tyan does produce motherboards that are loaded with high-end features such as dual channel Ultra160 SCSI and dual 100Mbit LAN. Remember though, there’s a price for everything, and in Tyan’s case, if you want the goods, be ready with cash.

What to ask yourself

The real question begging to be asked is should people even consider P4X266 motherboards? More and more Pentium 4 DDR chipsets are emerging from all fronts and VIA is finishing its validation process on its P4X266A chipset. The new revision seems to be more of a tweaked stepping than a features stepping but it will likely also come ready to support UltraATA/133 hard drives. We also have SiS and its 645 DDR chipset – a real trial blazer. Shocking practically everyone in the industry, SiS’ 645 outperforms a PC800 RDRAM P4 platform with regular PC2100 DDR RAM. The 645 is also very stable and runs very cool to the touch, not even requiring a passive heatsink. Finally, we have Intel’s i845D chipset but we doubt many of you who read FiringSquad would even consider an i845 solution. Even though it now officially supports DDR RAM, it does carry over its limitation from its SDRAM days.

With the P4X266, we receive good performance, but there are two things that really bother us. The first thing is its shaky support for memory modules and we needed to sift through a few different brands before finding modules that worked. The second thing is that there aren’t many P4X266 boards to choose from. We may even see more of a decline for P4X266 and even P4X266A support from manufacturers because VIA is now jumping the gun and producing its own branded motherboards. While this could bring VIA some benefits, it does bring along very controversial issues. VIA currently depends heavily on motherboard manufacturers to buy its chipsets. If VIA now makes its own motherboards, it must not only take on the extra burden of ensuring supply and support, but is also biting the hand that feeds it. We’ve seen this trend in various memorable companies like Aureal and 3dfx, and this is the very reason why NVIDIA chooses not to market its own boards.

After all considered, we’re leaning towards going with a SiS 645 platform for the budget-minded P4 fan, but we’ll hold that thought until we see more evidence and more boards based on P4X266. As of right now though, the P4X266 chipset is a formative yet formidable chipset, and may become a real contender with additional support.

SIDEBAR: Are you considering a P4X266 motherboard? Are you even considering a P4, given the price/performance of Athlon?

Let us know your thoughts, talk back on our Comments System!