Well, it appears I was right, there IS something fishy about the MSI Neo Plat 250GB!
Those of you who have been following my ranting of late may have heard me babbling about my MSI Neo Platinum. I've been complaining of low bandwidth, and all-round general lack-lustre performance from my 3400+ accross the board. This is after experimenting with numerous driver sets, THREE different types of RAM, and every BIOS under the sun.
Well, today things took a very interesting turn. Out of sheer frustration and curiousity I decided once and for all that I would try and discover the root of the problem, and see if it was in fact the actual motherboard itself that was the problem.
With this in mind, I bit the bullet and re-installed my old Gigabyte K8N NF3 150 and of course reformatted Windows while I was at it ( :cry ). After the install, I loaded my essential progs and benchmarks and got to work. After setting an OC of 11*220 (lower than what I was running before)I loaded up SANDRA as my main port of call. Instantly the results left me stunned. They showed a dramatic increase in CPU and memory performance, and confirmed what my suspicions had been all along.
This is what my CPU scores had been at 11x230 on the MSI...
http://premium.uploadit.org/Richdog/11x230.jpg
And these are the results from running a LOWER FSB and overall Mhz of 11x220 on the Gigabyte...
http://premium.uploadit.org/Richdog/Giga11x220.jpg
However I needed further proof, so I then loaded 3DMARK2001 and let her rip. BOOM. Straight to 24k+, where before I had only struggled to 23k on my MSI, RUNNING A HIGHER FSB AND OVERALL MHZ!
Here is what I was getting on my MSI, 2.45Ghz 11x223, 412/1100
http://premium.uploadit.org/Richdog/...45A64-3d01.jpg
And here is what I got with all-round LOWER clockspeeds on the Gigabyte, 11x220 on the CPU and 399/1100 on the GPU...
http://premium.uploadit.org/Richdog/...6800gt3d01.jpg
Moving onto 3DMARK2003 to see if there was any noticeable differences...
On the MSI, 2.45Ghz 11x223, 410/1100...
http://premium.uploadit.org/Richdog/....45ghz3d03.jpg
And on the Gigabyte, 2.4Ghz 11x220, 399/1100
http://premium.uploadit.org/Richdog/...0x11003d03.jpg
As are clear from these benchmarks, the lower clockspeeds and FSB of the Gigabyte are winning the day. Bear in mind the Gigabyte is based on the older and slower NF3 150 chipset, with it's 600Mhz HTT speed and 8-bit datastreams. Bear in mind also that the 6800GT is running at slower clocks on the Gigabyte, so these 3DMARK results are even more important.
I can only imagine how my results will improve once I get a new NF3 250GB board, that performs as it should, bandwidth and all, at an FSB of 250Mhz+. As you can imagine, the performance leaps from this will be substantial accross the board.
It is also worth mentioning that I did try every possible option, BIOS, and driver set on the MSI Neo Platinum before it came to this. No matter what I tried the results remained consistent around the board. I can only conclude that as well as having numerous horrible issues and quirks, the MSI Neo Platinum performs sub-par compared to other, even older boards. I am going to post these findings on the MSI Forums, but from my experiences there it is a place where people are not willing to listen to criticism, and as a whole they even disapprove of overclocking, so i'm not sure whether they'll take any of it on board.
Did I have a defective board? Hmm possibly, although not with any type of defect i've ever experienced. Make of these results what you will, i'm just happy that my mind is finally settled now I know what the problem is and that it was nothing to do with me. :smile:
