Friday, September 07, 2001

Benchmarks (continued...)

Video sub-system tests

The SL-75DRV's "Redstorm Overclocking Tech" function worked marvelously well. Thanks to it, we were able to push the FSB frequency to 150MHz, for a final CPU speed of 1350MHz using a stick of OCZ PC2100 memory. Then, as soon as we tried to boot into Windows, the system hung. Strangely though, when we rebooted from a cold start, everything was fine. After a lot of careful testing, we eventually determined that the source of the problem was an impedance mismatch between the board, and our OCZ memory. So, we suspected that in all likelyhood, users implementing different brands of memory (or even a different module from OCZ, who knows...) should be unaffected by this problem. Unfortunately, using a stick of Crucial memory didn't help, as the system stubbornly refused to boot at all with it installed. A stick of Micron memory worked quite well though, and allowed us to post excellent results, and boot into Windows without incident. In conclusion, the Soltek SL-75DRV can be a bit difficult to satisfy in terms of the memory it will work with...

That said, the SL-75DRV's graphics sub-system performance is still leagues ahead of the competition...

Disk sub-system tests

Next: Conclusions.