Date:
Thursday , January 27, 2005
Author:
Morry Teitelman
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
Google +1

DFI 855GME-MGF

The 855GME-MGF is one of the first retail motherboards able to use the much-vaunted Pentium-M line of processors. Read on to find out if this board should be your next major upgrade.

continued...

Subsystem Testing

NOTE: For all subsystem testing, a mobile Intel Pentium M 2.0GHz CPU (10x100MHz) with a 400MHz FSB and Kingston HyperX PC3500 memory running at 333MHz was used.

Audio – Subjective Listening

One of the easiest ways to determine the quality of the audio subsystem is via a subjective sound test. Ideally, a sound test requires audio covering the entire spectrum, from subtle to intense. For this test, I chose selected tracks from the Drowning Pool album Sinner.

Playback was flawless and very enjoyable. I detected no distortion of any kind coming through whatsoever.

Audio – Microphone Port Testing

The MIC-IN input was tested using a Labtec Desk Mic 524. Spoken word was recorded and played back using Microsoft Sound Recorder, with the Microphone Boost option disabled and enabled. The Microphone Boost option is found within the Advanced menu under the Microphone section within the Volume Control menu.

Again, the audio subsystem performed admirably. At no time did I detect any distortion on playback of the recorded audio test. However, recording pickup volume was better with the Microphone Boost option enabled.

Audio – In Game Testing

In addition to CD or MP3 playback, users most often rely on the audio subsystem for gaming. Whether it is for stand alone first person shooters or online death matching, to adequately test the quality of the audio subsystem during game type scenarios, we took benchmark measurements with sound enabled and disabled using the following benchmarks: Jedi Knight 2 and Comanche 4.

Article Image

While not bad, the in-game performance test results were simply adequate. As expected, the D3D based results were significantly worse than the results from the OpenGL game by a 10% margin, with the D3D results suffering a 20% performance loss. You really shouldn’t notice degradation in gameplay, however, until your frame rates drop below the 40-50 FPS threshold. Overall, the board offers a solid all around implementation of the integrated sound system.

Drive Performance

To adequately test the capabilities of the onboard USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394 connections, we chose to use an ACOMDATA HD060U2FE-72-USB 2.0/FireWire HDD connected first to the USB port and then to the IEEE 1394 port. SATA and IDE drive tests were performed using a Maxtor 40Gb ATA 133 model 6E040L0 hard drive on the IDE header and Seagate 80 GB Barracuda SATA hard drives on the SATA headers. The SATA drives were used for testing in RAID 0 with 16k block size configurations on the Intel RAID controller. Testing was also conducted using a stand-alone SATA drive on the Intel controller, and an IDE drive connected in a master/slave configuration. All drive benchmarks were performed using the open source Iometer program.

Article Image

Article Image

Article Image

Even though the IDE drive’s performance was good, the SATA drives performed that much better. As expected, the RAID 0 SATA array performed the best. The external drive tests were another story. While the CPU utilization numbers were in line with expectations, the USB device used much more of the CPU, and the measured response times and I/O operations per second were well under the expected results for both external device types. The I/O operations per second measurements were about 6 points lower than expected, while the response time numbers were more than 2 ms higher than expected. In both categories, this translates to a 10-15% performance loss over expected numbers. This points to some type of overall implementation issue with both the USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394 implementations.

Network Utilization Tests

Hagel Technologies’ DU Meter software was used in conjunction with Windows Task Manager to measure the performance of the onboard Realtek GigE integrated controller. DU meter was used to measure bandwidth, with Windows TaskMan to monitor the CPU utilization on the test system. For the test itself, a 750MB archive file containing various sized .wma audio files for the large file transfer test and a 750MB worth of various sized .wma audio files for the small files transfer test were used in conjunction with an Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit NIC on the host system, and a crossover cable to connect the host system to the test system. A crossover cable was used to rule out any possible bandwidth losses due to hub or switch passage.

Article Image Article Image Article Image Article Image

The small file transfer results came out as expected, with a 6MB/s speed difference between downloads and uploads. The unexpected trend was the higher than anticipated CPU utilization during file download of 30%. The CPU utilization during upload stayed at a mere 10%.

Article Image Article Image Article Image Article Image

The large file transfer results mimicked those of the small file transfer very closely. While not a bad implementation by any stretch, the higher than expected CPU utilization during download is a bit troubling.

Test Systems

The following system configurations were used for the Sandra memory benchmark graph, as well as all graphs listed under the Application and Gaming Benchmark sections:

DFI 855GME-MGF (i855GME) - Intel Pentium M 2.0GHz processor at stock 2.0GHz and at 2.53GHz (18 x 140Mhz FSB), 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMSDDR3200LLPro DDR400 (2,3,2,5), NVIDIA NV45 (400/550) (v61.75 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

ASUS P5AD2-E Premium (i925XE) - Intel 3.46GHz Extreme Edition, 1GB (2x512MB) Micron Engineering Sample DDR2-533 (4,4,4,12), NVIDIA NV45 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

Intel D925XECV2 (i925XE) - Intel 3.6GHz (model # 560), 1GB (2x512MB) Micron Engineering Sample DDR2-533 (4,4,4,12), NVIDIA NV45 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

ABIT AG8 (i915P) - Intel 3.6GHz (model # 560), 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMSDDR3200LLPro DDR400 (2,3,2,5), NVIDIA NV45 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

ABIT AA8 (i925X) - Intel 3.4GHz Extreme Edition, 1GB (2x512MB) Micron Engineering Sample DDR2-533 (4,4,4,12), NVIDIA NV45 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

Intel D875PBZ (i875P) - Intel 3.4GHz Prescott, 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMSDDR3200LLPro DDR400 (2,3,2,5), NVIDIA NV40 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

Asus A8V Deluxe (VIA K8T800Pro) - Athlon64 3800+, 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMSDDR3200LLPro DDR400 (2,3,2,5), NVIDIA NV40 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

MSI K8T Neo2-FIR (VIA K8T800Pro) - Athlon64 FX-55, 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMSDDR3200LLPro DDR400 (2,3,2,5), NVIDIA NV40 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

For the WorldBench 2005 and Doom3 benchmarks, the following additional system configurations were used:

DFI 925X-T2 (i925X) - Intel 3.6GHz (model # 560), 1GB (2x512MB) Micron Engineering Sample DDR2-533 (4,4,4,12), NVIDIA NV45 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

DFI 915P-T12 (i915P) - Intel 3.6GHz (model # 560), 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMSDDR3200LLPro DDR400 (2,3,2,5), NVIDIA NV45 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

MSI K8T Neo2-FIR (VIA K8T800Pro) - Athlon64 3800+, 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMSDDR3200LLPro DDR400 (2,3,2,5), NVIDIA NV40 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (nForce3 Ultra) - Athlon64 3800+, 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMSDDR3200LLPro DDR400 (2,3,2,5), NVIDIA NV40 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

Our two legacy systems will, of course, not be kept up to date with the latest technology, but they both use DDR400 and ATA133 IDE hard drives and ATI 9800XT video cards.

ABIT NF7 (NVIDIA NF2) - AthlonXP 2400+ 133MHz System bus, 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMSDDR400Pro DDR400 (2,3,2,5), ATI 9800XT (ATI Catalyst 3.8 drivers), 40GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

Intel D875PBZ (i875P) - Pentium 4 2.4C - Intel, 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMSDDR400Pro DDR400 (2,3,2,5), ATI 9800XT (ATI Catalyst 3.8 drivers), 40GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

Graphs are labeled as follows: Motherboard - CPU Clock - FSB Clock - Memory Clock

SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

Article Image

Note that all results above were obtained running the installed memory in Dual Channel mode, with the exception of the DFI 855GME which only supports Single Channel memory mode.

While the 855GME’s memory numbers are not too impressive comparatively speaking, you must keep in mind that the processor on the board is running at a mere 400MHz FSB with the memory running at a not too speedy 333MHz.