Mercury’s Latest P4 Motherboard

The KOB 845 WFSX, based on the new Intel 845 chipset, is built on an ATX form factor and has a socket 423 for accommodating the P4. The highlight of the board is that it can fit into any standard ATX cabinet, unlike other P4 boards we’ve seen so far. It also has three DIMM slots, which can together take in 3 GB of conventional SDRAM. Expandability is easy with the six PCI slots, a CNR and a 4x AGP slot, which can take in the latest graphics cards. It also has two ATA/100 connectors, where you can connect up to four IDE devices. The other ports (USB, parallel, two serial, game port and audio ports) are color-coded and can be found onboard. Its jumper-less configuration through the BIOS lets you adjust the clock speed of your processor and set the RAM speed without having to fiddle with jumpers and DIP switches.

To check out the board’s performance we used a P4 2 GHz, 128 MB, 133 MHz SDRAM along with an Asus V7700 graphics card having 32 MB video memory and Geforce2 GTS chip. We also used a 7,200 rpm IBM drive and installed Windows 98 SE on it, and compared the results against a DFI WT70-EC board, which had the Intel 850 chipset, and 128 MB of RDRAM. Rest of the configuration was kept same. We tested both boards in 3D graphics, gaming and normal productivity work. For graphics, we ran 3DMark 2001, where the Mercury board scored 2886 points (much lower compared to 3426 of the DFI board). For gaming, we first ran 3D Winbench 2000 (which gives an overall frame rate after running a set of graphics intensive games), where the difference in scores was not much, with this board scoring 117 fps as compared to the 122 fps of the 850-based system. We then ran Quake III Arena and measured the frame rates. Here, although the board got lower frame rates, it doesn’t make a difference for the end user.

To check it for normal productivity work, we ran BW 2001, which runs common productivity applications like Office, Netscape and Norton AntiVirus. This board scored 43.5, which was only a single point behind the 850-based system with 44.5. We also checked it for suitability in running graphics and content-creation applications such as Macromedia Director, DreamWeaver, and Adobe Photoshop. Here, too, the board was not far behind with a score of 42.7 compared to 43.1 of the DFI system.

The biggest advantage of this board is the price. At Rs 6,500, it is definitely worth a buy, especially since it works with SDRAM, which is inexpensive compared to
RDRAM.

Sachin Makhija