ECS 915P-A The first motherboard supporting both the PCI Express and The AGP Express.

Transcription

1 When PCI Express meets AGP Express ECS 915P-A The first motherboard supporting both the PCI Express and The AGP Express. The PCI Express support is the main technology of the new 915/925 chipset. So eager to establish the PCI Express technology as a mainstream, Intel even takes the AGP interface out of the chipset. This makes users feel cold feet to migrate to a new platform adopting the chipset if there is not yet a good PCI-E video card available. A forcing migration The sales of the new 915/925 platform is flat and have got little help from the availability of the LGA775 processor, DDR2 memory, and PCI Express video card. It is a disappointment considering the popularity the 865/875 platforms gained last year. This is because this new platform and the previous one are complete different in hardware. The differences force those who want to migrate have to give up most of their investment in the previous platform. The lack of the PCI-Express video card choices, especially high-end ones, is one big reason keeping a user from migrating to the 915/975 platform. Those who considering upgrade to the new platform are most likely to considering a high-grade PCI-E video card, and more likely those who already have a high-end AGP video card in their machines. World s first AGP Express interface by ECS To ease up the migration, ECS presents a motherboard, codenamed 915P-A. This new motherboard supports the DDR1/DDR2 memory and, most important here, the AGP and PCI-E video card in one box. Further more, the support for the AGP and PCI-E video cards is a simultaneous one, facilitating a user the ability to operate the AGP card and PCI-E card in the same time. The interface for the AGP card is supported by a Southbridge chipset here, contrary to other motherboards generally by a Northbridge chipset. For this motherboard, the Northbridge and Southbridge chipsets linked through the DMI with 2GB/s bandwidth, which is much faster than with the Hub Link with 266MB/s and is almost the same bandwidth as AGP 8x. Since the 2GB/s bandwidth still need to be shared with other devices such as the PCI-E x1, PCI, HD Audio, and hard drives, and suffer the loss raised from the signal transforming, the actual bandwidth available shall be lower than the AGP 8x and the latency time longer. This implies the AGP interface shall be inevitably slower than a genuine AGP interface in performance.

2 The AGP Express slot Features of the 915-A This motherboard adopts Intel s 915 chipset as well as an ICH6 Southbridge chipset, and has a Socket LGA775. It also has two DDR1 and two DDR2 memory slots. You can only utilize either the pair of the DDR1 or of the DDR2 since their use different voltage. This motherboard supports up to 2GB memory and 533MHZ transfer rate for the DDR2, and provide the ability to adjust the latency of the memory accessing. Along side the PCI-E x16 slot and the AGP Express slot, there are two PCI x1 slots and two traditional PCI slots for high expandability. The spec. of the testing machine: CPU:Intel Pentium 4 3.4E GHz, M/B: ECS 915P-A, MagicPro MP-P6PE-1000 Pro, RAM: Micron 512MB DDR2-533 x 2, GEIL 512MB DDR400 x 2, HDD: Seagate Barracuda SATA , OS: Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP1, DirectX 9.0b, VGA: WinFast GFFX 5700LE, Magic-Pro PCX 5750, WinFast GF 6800GT and NV45, Power supply: 2theMax HE550 3xIO The driver dialog box only shows the PCI x0 is used There is a power warning indicator along side the memory slots Great expandability

3 The 24-ping power supply socket, also supporting 20-pin. Supports DDR1 and DDR2 Realtek s RTLB110S Gb network chip The CMI9880 CODEC chip, supporting HD Audio. Further more, this motherboard has eight USB 2.0 ports, CMI9880 HD Audio Codec, Realtek RTL8110S Gb LAN, and four SATA (non-raid). This motherboard uses a 24-pin power supply socket. You still can use it as a conventional 20-pin power socket but will get beeping sound every time you boot up your system - kind of annoying. The simultaneous operation of two graphic cards

4 Compatibility of AGP Express Since the AGP Express feature is not directly supported by the chipsets, the compatibility of this feature shall be the major issue. According to the test conducted in ECS, the result shows the Radeon 8500/9000/9200/9700/9800 and most of the GeForce series graphic cards are supported. In that test, the newest Geforce 6800GT was fully functional but the Radeon The testing machine with the Radeon 9600 installed cannot boot up properly. This problem is supposed can be solve with an updated BIOS in the future. For details on this issue, please check the website You can install a PCI-E video card along with an AGP Express compatible video card and make both cards operating simultaneously to configure a dual-display environment or even a 4-display easily. However, operating two video cards simultaneously will reduce the performance of the system to a degree. The installation of the video card drivers is fairly easy and effortless. You can installed two graphic cards Furthermore, the compatibility to the Pentium 4 Extreme and Prescott processors was also tested. The result shows the Prescott processor will be fully supported but the Extreme processor. The cause of this incompatibility is not yet determined, could be BIOS problem or the design of the motherboard. However, the future P4 processors shall be Prescott-cored, so the incompatibility problem will not be an issue. Setup is easy Its BIOS is based on the same philosophy -simplicity- as its predecessor. The BIOS provides only the basic and necessary items. The range for overclocking is considerably conservative. The maximum rate for the system bus is 232MHz and actual data transfer rate is up to 928MHZ. The only setup item for the memory is the timing ratio, 1:1 or 3:4. We have tested the overclock feature of this motherboard with overclocking the system bus to 232MHz and the memory to 618MHz, and the result is excellent without any problem.

5 The configuration is straightforward You can set your favorite video card as the primary one

6 Test results Test.1: Graphic test GFFX 5700LE/5750 AGP 8X AGP Express WinFast GeForce 6800 GT/NV45 PCI-E PCI-E AGP 8X AGP Express 3Dmark GT GT GT GT Fillrate Single Fillrate Multi Vertex Shader Pixel Shade Ragtroll Dmark2001S E UT2003 Flyby Botmatch Aquamark Quake III Demo 1 Quake III Demo 2 Far Cry(1.1) Halo Splinter Cell Analysis Comparing the AGP Express environment with the genuine AGP, The result shows the difference between theses two environments is small for the medium-grade graphic cards. This is because the chips of these graphic cards are slow and drag the performance. However, for the hind-end graphic cards, The AGP outrun the AGP Express 30%. The difference is unreasonably large when testing with the Quake III. This could be caused by the driver problem.

7 WinFast GeForce 6800 GT/NV45 AGP 8X AGP Express AGP 8X AGP Express 1024x768 noaa/noaf 1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF 3Dmark GT GT GT GT Fillrate Single Fillrate Multi Vertex Shader Pixel Shade Ragtroll Dmark2001SE UT2003 Flyby Botmatch Quake III Demo Quake III Demo Far Cry(1.1) Halo Splinter Cell Analysis When the resolution of the display is set to 1600 x 1200@4xAA/8xAF, the result shows the gap between the AGP 8x and the AGP Express reduces distinctively. This implies the higher resolution the higher performance you can gin for using a high-end graphic card.

8 Test 2: overclock test 2.8GHz 3.25GHz 3.4GHz System bus 200MHz 232MHz 200MHz Sandra ALU FPU/SSE2 2859/ / /7132 Int SSE Float SSE Mem Int Mem Float PCMark CPU Memory Super Pi 47s 40s 40s Analysis In this test, we first downclock the CPU to 2.8 MHz and, then, overclock the system bus to 232MHz. After that, we overclock the CPU to 3.25GHz and the memory to 618MHz. The inability to raise the voltage doesn t infect the stability of the system, and the performance is almost as good as a Pentium 3.4GHz machine.