Five i845E mainboards in the test: who will win?

3DMark 2000

Even if it is quite old, the 3D Mark 2000 from MadOnion.com continues to be a very meaningful benchmark for mainboards. Since the tests used are already inDefault run does not represent a real hurdle for the GeForce3 Ti200, the CPU, RAM and chipset can really let off steam.

In 3DMark 2000, which is our first Direct3D benchmark, the five contenders retained at least somewhat in an orderly order. Clearly in first place is the P4B533-E from Asus, the second and third share the EP-4BEAR and GA-8IEXP, the fourth goes to the 845E Max2-BLR and this time at the end of our i845E mainboards is the IT7 from Abit. But you shouldn't overestimate a few points of difference in 3DMark, as they are often rather insignificant and hardly to be found in real everyday scenarios.

CPU Mark

A popular component of 3DMark 2000 is the CPU mark. In this discipline, the processor has to calculate two game scenes without much help from the graphics card. Only the T&L unit and the performance of the mainboard and memory are significant.

As part of 3DMark 2000, the CPU Mark very nicely reflects its end result in this case. So let's go straight to its successor.

On the next page: 3DMark 2001 SE