Tests
Since this is marketed as a mainstream motherboard, the test setup will use less expensive, more mainstream parts.
- Athlon 64 3500+ AM2 2.2GHz with included heat sink fan
- Two 512MB OCZ DDR2 PC2-4300 533MHz in Dual channel mode
- On-board GeForce 6100 graphics with 64MB of system memory used for the frame buffer
- Two Western Digital WD800JD hard disks in RAID 0
- Panasonic DVD-ROM
- LITE-ON Dual Layer DVDRW, model SOHW-1693S
SiSoft Sandra
Sandra is a synthetic benchmark, testing the theoretical capabilities of your computer. Sandra is nevertheless very useful for system comarisons, as well as for testing stability. Athlon 64 CPUs have a built-in memory controller making them score very well in the memory bandwidth section of the test.
Half Life 2
This superb game by Valve is surely one that people will still be playing for years. And guess what? It plays beautifully on the GeForce 6100! Half Life 2 does a very good job of recognizing your system configuration and recommending appropriate settings. In this case, it recommended: model detail: high; water detail: reflect world; shader detail: high; filtering mode: trilinear; vertical sync: off. After trying out a few different resolution and anti-aliasing settings, the highest quality setting that was still playable was 800×600 with 2xAntiAliasing. Truly amazing for integrated graphics.
F.E.A.R.
First Encounter Assault Recon is a game that can bring even the most powerful system to its knees. So how about an unpretentious system like we have here today? Well, in order to play at an even semi-decent frame rate, you’ve got to set the resolution to 640×480, and minimize or turn off all the eye candy. Now, once that is done, you can play the game…but is this really the way you want to play it? My vote is no.
World of Warcraft
Although it doesn’t have an associated, repeatable benchmark, World of Warcraft (or WoW) is a very fun massively multiplayer game, and extremely popular. Theoretically, you only need a graphics card as powerful as a GeForce 2MX from several years ago. But, like with F.E.A.R., you would have to turn down a lot of eye candy. I am happy to say that the GeForce 6100 performs perfectly well with all the details set to high, and with the resolution set to 1024×768. If at some point the frames per second measure a bit on the low side, you could easily turn the details down a little. My experience playing WoW with this board has been very nice.
Prime95
This is a great tool for torture testing both your CPU as well as your system RAM. Prime95 is geared towards searching for Mersenne prime numbers. I have no idea what one can do with a Mersenne prime number, but mathematicians seem to get excited by them. If your computer is just sitting around idle, you can put those extra cycles to use, and join the hunt for those elusive Mersennes. Check out http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm for more information.
For our purposes, the longer you can run the Torture Test function of Prime95 without error, the more stable your system should be overall. This is especially useful for testing how stable your system is while overclocking. The test system was left running for 39 hours with zero errors.
3Dmark05
You may love this program, you may hate this program, but it is still a fun technology demonstrator, and can also help you explore the limits of your graphics accelerator. Running the program at stock settings on the GeForce 6100 was painfully slow – we’re talking 1 frame per second slow. Even turning the settings down to a rediculously low 320×240 resolution didn’t help. The framerate only got up to 5-6 fps, so although it runs, it is not a treat.
