In all the mainboards, bios settings were left at default.    All mainboards automatically adjusting the clock speed settings and voltages to facilitate the CPU’s and Memory to maintain the higher functionality which each mainboard has to offer.

Hardware Suppliers for the Review

MSI & Supermicro for the supply of the Mainboards shown, Corsair, for the supply of their Dominator memory, Western Digital for the SATA Hard Discs, AMD for the supply of the FireGL V3600 professional graphics card, Man and Machine for the supply of the and FireGL V7200, and finally but by no means least; Akasa for a majority peripherals required for this review and finally DELL for the supply of the Precision 690 Workstation. Our thanks to all involved in making this an interesting but exciting review.   

Time ran severely against us in getting this review ready therefore in the coming few weeks we will be showing a review of each of the new mainboards supplied from Supermicro and MSI not forgetting of course the DELL system.    One further point of note.   We have just received at going to press; 2 brand new spanking 3.0GHZ Woodcrest Xeon CPU's.    These are currently in the Dell Precision 690 System running the array of benchmarks listed.   As soon as the results are ready we will post an amendment into the review showing the results achieved.

With the support and help of all the companies involved this has been a cracking first look a AMD’s new FireGL card.   It gives you the reader a choice on upgrade paths that many of you look for here with the performance ratio’s each system has to provide.

Corsair’s new Dominator memory really has hit home, expensive in some areas for some, but the performance and stability that we encountered over these last few months has been magnificent. Ranting on once more stability in the high-end is of a paramont and for those inclined and feel the need for speed, we can say that this memory on the mainboards from Supermicro and MSI the memory can be well tweaked.    It will be interesting to see what DDR3 brings when timings have been finally settled upon and the new mainboards which support it.

Systems Integrators, OEM’s and VAR’s should contact all companies directly for pricing and availability of all components. Members of the public should contact their respective suppliers requesting the parts directly.

Diskeeper can be purchased from most leading Distributors and software retail outlets. Or those of you wishing a try before buy, a 30 day trial version maybe downloaded direct from Diskeeper Europe. We highly recommend the use of this software as performance increase can be quite considerable in many places. 

Benchmarks and Software Used (32 Bit Mode)

The plethora of benchmarks available in this arena; one could spend all day in producing results if the time permitted, paralysis by analysis!  Sadly the clock ticked hard and fast against us therefore we did only have a very short time in which to complete this basic but factual review.

Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2
Diskeeper 2007 Professional Premium Edition
Cinebench 9.5
** SPECviewperf® 10.0

** So that readers will be able to see how much performance increase has been gained throughout the range SPECviewperf® tests by the individual cards.   We have split up into their individual test categories from each test system and run.   Therefore one page has been dedicated for the benchmark results from each of the mainboards/system supplied.   This will give the reader an idea of what to expect from whether an AMD or Intel based system that they currently possess or plan in purchase.

To complete all of the tests on the systems has taken some considerable time to complete. As a point of note it takes at least a full 2 – 3 hours to properly complete a complete “run all tests” though it does feed back to the end users considerable amounts of information for digestion especially within the Composites and Multisample Results.   Each card completed the tests etc on a clean system hard drive to ensure that no residue drivers were left installed.   A test/render has been completed many times over different periods of the system uptime.   Maintaining the fair play rules of SPECviewperf® we did not manipulate any of this mainboards functionality and left it at its default settings in which it was supplied.   All tests have been conducted at 1280 X 1024 @ 60Hz in 32 bit colour. Results that have been shown on this review are from the application/benchmarks first run in accordance with the SPECviewperf® fair play rules.

The results speak very clearly for themselves as a picture paints a thousand words; so there is no need for a running commentary of the results gained from each system.  “Run Logs” the SPECviewperf® tests are available to those of you who wish to see them.    Please e-mail the administrator here who will forward them onto you on a first come first served basis.    This may take some time to get back to you as on first out launches of this nature we are undated with requests.