845 motherboard

A couple of weeks ago, we took an in-depth look at five motherboards using the Intel 925X chipset . As a group, we found them to be a bit on the pricey side, with the lowest-cost 925X board, the Abit AA8, at about $160. Not everyone needs the high-priced spread, and it's not clear what kind of performance margin the 925X really offers over the 915 series chipsets. So we put a few motherboards based on variants of the 915 to see how they fare against the 925X. We also tested an LGA775 board based on Intel's older 865PE chipset. Of the five 915 boards, two used the 915G chipset and three used the 915P. One of the 915G boards and two of the 915P boards support standard DDR400 memory, while the rest support DDR2/533. Of course, not all of these boards are inexpensive. In fact, two are priced right up there with the more rarified 925X boards. Would you pay as much for a 915P board as you would a 925X board? The answer may surprise you.Testbed and Benchmark Setup We build each test system using an identical set of components, to give each board an even playing field: Processor: Pentium 4 3.6GHz LGA775 CPU (Prescott) (check prices) Memory: 2x512MB Kingston ValueRAM DDR2/533 (check prices) Graphics: Nvidia PCI Express GeForce 6800GT (66.81 drivers) Audio: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 (check prices) Hard drive: Seagate ST160827AS 160GB SATA Drive with support for Native Command Queuing (check prices) Optical drive: ATAPI DVD-ROM Drive Operating system: Windows XP Professional / SP2 A clean install of Windows XP with Service Pack 2 was installed. We then ran the following benchmark suite: BAPCO Sysmark 2004, which replaces our now-obsolete Winstone suite. 3D Studio R6 performance, using the SPEC APC test. This benchmark tests both interactive and rendering performance. PCMark 2004, to gauge memory and CPU performance. 3DMark 2005 CPU Test as a memory and CPU check. Windows Media Encoder 9 video encode, to check throughput on encoding. A multitasking scenario using Norton Antivirus 2003 and Photoshop elements. Photoshop Elements runs a scripted sequence of filters while NAV2003 performs a virus scan of a directory of known size. Four games: Unreal Tournament 2003 ET Botmatch, Flight Sim 2004, Doom 3 and Halo. SPEC Viewperf 8.01. This is a mostly graphics intensive test using recordings from a suite of professional 3D applications. It hammers on the graphics interface and actually stresses both AGP and PCI Express a bit more than the game benchmarks. One other test we ran, which wasn't strictly a benchmark, was Memtest 86+ version 1.27. We ran memtest for several hours on two-DIMM and four-DIMM configurations to check overall memory stability. Each board was configured to run at stock speeds: 266MHz memory clock and 200MHz frontside bus. The memory timings were set to use the SPD (serial presence detect) chip to run at default timings. All auto-overclocking was disabled. Normally, benchmark differences among motherboards running the same set of components are really minimal. We used the benchmarks more as a sanity check, and to test stability. It's unlikely that you'd see more than minor differences in performance. We did run into one exception--probably BIOS-related--that affected three of the motherboards. We'll discuss this when we get to the section on Viewperf 8.01.

DHOP ER motherboard.915 SOB CHE BHALO.845 A TO AGP CARD LAGANO JAI NA.

Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility version 7.2.1.1003 For Win2000/XP/2003(2005-7-13)that is the newest driver i can find. do u need that?