Benchmarks; QIII Arena & Conclusions
Quake III Arena is a First Person Shooter (FPS)
that revolutionized gaming as we know it. Using multiple light sources and
having graphics textures that can fill videocards, even after 3 years it's still
able to bring a cutting edge system to its knees.
Quake III Arena Fastest demo001 |
|
Motherboard |
FPS |
Ranking |
1. |
850 Pro5 - 100 MHz FSB |
271.6 |
|
2. |
850 Pro5 - 112 MHz FSB |
301.7 |
|
Quake III Arena Fastest nv15demo |
|
Motherboard |
FPS |
Ranking |
1. |
850 Pro5 - 100 MHz FSB |
74.2 |
|
2. |
850 Pro5 - 112 MHz FSB |
82.1 |
|
Quake III
Arena has always loved the memory bandwidth a P4/RDRAM has and here the 850 Pro5
does very well. With a slight overclock we are able to crack 300 fps in demo001!
Let's see how the system handles 1024x768...
Quake III Arena MAX 1024x768 demo001
|
|
Motherboard |
FPS |
Ranking |
1. |
850 Pro5 - 100 MHz FSB |
216.5 |
|
2. |
850 Pro5 - 112 MHz FSB |
234.7 |
|
Quake III Arena MAX 1024x768 nv15demo
|
|
Motherboard |
FPS |
Ranking |
1. |
850 Pro5 - 100 MHz FSB |
51.1 |
|
2. |
850 Pro5 - 112 MHz FSB |
57.1 |
|
Here at
1024x768 the differences stay about the same. Pure Quake III gaming bliss.
Conclusion:
The MSI 850 Pro5
is a great motherboard; stability was excellent during testing. As we can see from the
benchmarks the performance of the board is very good to say the least - it passed
all our tests with flying colours.
Even though there are not as many tweaks for
the overclocker to play with, the 850 Pro5 should be able to satisfy almost any
performance user since it offers quite a bit of overclocking options. Best of
all the price is right; retailing for only $175 CDN, it's easily one of the
most affordable RDRAM-based Pentium 4 motherboards out there.
Of course
with everything good, there comes the bad. The biggest negative is the limit to just four PCI expansion slots.
That is not much for a motherboard which may be replacing one with five or
six slots. It would have been nice to have the power connectors grouped together,
but that is more of a passing comment than anything else. It is obviously more
important for the engineers to get a good clean layout
than centralize small things like power connector placements. USB 2.0 would have been a great option to
future proof this motherboard, but since it has been out
for a while now it was no doubt a little premature at the time of
its initial release.
IDE RAID is a bit of a shocker. It is hard to
imagine why RAID would have been omitted from a Pentium 4 board at this stage of
the game.
Overall,
we were very happy with the MSI 850 Pro5, it's a very powerful Pentium
4 motherboard that can handle all your office and gaming needs. Should you turn to
the dark side and try your hand at overclocking, the 850 Pro5 can handle that with
grace and speed as well. That is what I really like to see :)
Related Articles:
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as well...
1. Epox 4SDA+ SiS645 Socket 478 Motherboard 2.
Intel D850GB P4 Motherboard 3. MSI 845 Ultra-ARU DDR / P4 Motherboard 4. Epox 4B2A i845 P4
Motherboard 5. Intel
Pentium 4 2.0 GHz Review
|