Testbed configuration
-
DFI CA64-EC mainboard
-
Intel P3-700 cb0 stepping
-
128megs Mushkin PC150 ESDRAM (a wee bit overkill,
but it's what I've got :)
-
Hercules Prophet 3D DDR/DVI Geforce 32meg AGP
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Onboard AC97' audio enabled
-
Maxtor DiamondMax UDMA66 13.6G HDD
First off, to save your time, I'm skipping the Sandra
CPU and Media benches. Suffice to say it tests as fast as it should in those
benches. Those benches would matter if we were overclocking, but there's no
reason to try with this board. The kicker here is the Memory benchmark.
As you can see, the memory performance is extremely
weak. This has been seen time and time again in board reviews of the VIA Apollo
Pro 133a chipset. Most manufacturers have learned their lessons here and at
least provided the necessary system tweaks in the BIOS to get respectable memory
bandwidth performance enabled, but DFI has not. I could use some utilities
available, such as WPCREDIT to manually tweak some settings, but I don't really
see the average Joe going to the effort on this board with it's limited FSB
options.
Quake3Arena v.1.25y Beta Point Release, Timedemo DEMO000
I placed it head to head against the numbers from their
DFI AK74-SC SocketA board review...
Nothing surprising here, at least the abysmal memory
bandwidth scores in Sandra haven't translated into poor performance here.
Conclusions.
I'm really lukewarm about this board. I did my usual
with it, and left it running Prime95, did a bit of Q3a playing on it, and
everything went well. No hardware installation anomalies, mysterious crashes, or
anything bad really happened. Of course that should be expected from ANY board
that's at a stock clockrate. Having no real FSB or overclocking options on the
board, gave me no real opportunities to really stress it, and test it's mettle.
It's clear from both DFI board reviews that I've done here, that DFI is strictly
interested in the value OEM market. In that market space, they're still
basically average, as most manufacturers have figured out and dealt with the
memory performance issues surrounding use of the VIA Apollo Pro 133a chipset.
While I'm not trashing the board in this review I feel, there's certainly little
to get excited about with the DFI CA64-EC.
Pros:
-
Inexpensive
-
Stable
-
Clean Layout
Cons:
Rating:
6/10
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