PCChips M847LU SiS 746 + Xabre 200 Motherboard

versus

Nforce2 IGP

Review by Edward Chang, call sign: Big_E

February 1, 2003

System Setup:

Test Systems:

AMD Athlon Thoroughbred 2600+ (Provided by AMD)

Default clock: 2075 MHz (12.5x166)

Stable Overclock: 2250 MHz (12.5x180)

PCChips M847LU SiS 746 + Xabre 200

Leadtek WinFast K7NCR18D-Pro Nforce2 SPP motherboard + eVGA GeForce4 MX 440 @ 260/183 (MX 430 equivalent) * In order to simulate an Nforce2 IGP, we clocked as such.

EPoX 8K5A2+ VIA KT333 motherboard + ATI Radeon 9700 Pro

EPoX 8K9A2+ VIA KT400 motherboard + ATI Radeon 9700 Pro

KingMax 2x256 MB PC3200 DDR RAM (Provided by KingMax)

ATi Radeon 9700 Pro (Provided by ATI)

Western Digital Special Edition 80 GB 8MB Cache ATA100 Hard Drive (Provided by Western Digital)

Liteon 48X CDROM (Provided by Directron)

Windows XP

Compaq 15" monitor

Drivers

Windows XP Radeon 9700 driver version 6.13.10.6218

VIA 4-in-1 4.45v

Benchmarks

Madonion 3DMark2001 Second Edition (patched)

MadOnion PCMark2002

Return to Castle Wolfenstein - IXBTDemo

Unreal Tournament 2003

Content Creation 2002

SiSoft Sandra 2003 Pro

Overclocking

PCChips has the enthusiast in mind when they designed the M847LU. Although lacking in multiplier and CPU voltage selection, the BIOS does allow the user to overclock the FSB in 1 MHz increments up to 200 MHz. One will need to use a 166 MHz FSB AMD processor to gain access to the higher FSB range of 166 to 200. A neat feature of the M847LU's BIOS is that it supports a wide variety of asynchronous FSB and DDR RAM clock dividers:

With the memory running at Normal settings and the 1:1 CPU/DRAM Frequency Ratio, we had a maximum stable overclock of 2.25 GHz. The onboard Xabre200 can overclock to 230/230 using Powerstrip or the included Xabre 200 software utilities.