Asus PC-DL Deluxe: 875 with Dual Xeons
by Wesley Fink on September 6, 2003 12:06 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Final Words
The Asus PC-DL is a product that both excites and disappoints. As the first in what will likely be a long line of Xeon 875 boards, we are very excited about where this branch of development is headed. There is a lot of promise in the prospect of Dual 800FSB Xeons. It is also easy to get excited about the idea of a future PC-DL BIOS upgrade with the full range of tweaking and overclocking options we have today on another Asus Canterwood board — the P4C800-E. When we see how well the Dual-Xeon is executed and how stable the current PC-DL is with two Xeon 3.06 1Mb Cache processors, it makes us hopeful about what is coming.On the other hand, if we take a close look at the current PC-DL as it exists today, it is hard not to be disappointed. Overclocking options consist of only a very modest FSB adjustment and multipliers that can only be adjusted down on 3.06 processors. There is no PCI/AGP lock, so even these modest options perform poorly. Perhaps worst of all, the modest overclocking options are turned off when any SATA drive is attached to the PC-DL and SATA is enabled in the BIOS.
We also have reservations about where Dual Xeon will really go in the competition with Opteron and Athlon64. There are things that could be better in the execution of Opteron/Athlon64, but one area no one questions is that Opteron scales much better than Xeon. As Anand Shimpi showed in his April launch review of the Opteron, the Opteron CPU gains almost 24% in performance in the move from 1 to 2 CPUs while Xeon gains just 11.4%.
With a single Opteron 2.0GHz already very competitive in most areas with this Dual-Xeon setup, we would expect Dual Opteron to dramatically out-perform this Dual-Xeon setup as we move ahead.
In the things it does very well — Media Encoding and Multimedia Content Creation — the Asus PC-DL is easy to recommend. Also, as a fast workstation or a cost-effective SOHO server, the PC-DL would be a very good choice. However, as a gaming platform or Computer Enthusiasts “brag” box, the Asus PC-DL has a long way to go. The promise is certainly there, but the hardware needs to evolve with Xeons competitive with current Pentium 4 processors. Asus also needs to work on the tweaking and overclocking options, to bring them to the level that will genuinely excite gamers and enthusiasts. Perhaps they can do that with a BIOS upgrade. We certainly hope so.
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Kiwi42084 - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link
This Benchmark is totally unfair!!!!!The PC-DL has the avalibility to produce 4 usable CPUs...2 Physical and 2 Logical....
Windows XP will only see 2 of these. The benchmarks are being done with Half of the POWER POTENTIAL.
vppaul - Wednesday, February 25, 2004 - link
I am having a problem with my PC-DL board. The System Management BIOS is reporting that there is 4096 MB of RAM, but Windows reports that 2048 MB is available. Anybody ideas? I am trying to get help from Asus tech support but any help would be appreciated. Running dual 3.06 with 4 x 1GB sticks.piperfect - Monday, February 23, 2004 - link
I totally agree with FutureShock999. Why not run several instances of the a divx encoder. For instance do a 2 part movie on an encoder that runs two threads per instance then run both of the parts at the same time in two instances of the program on the xeon and see who finishes first. What you guys are doing is like comparing an f-16 fighter jet to a f-15 and saying the f-15 can only use one of its engines.piperfect - Wednesday, February 11, 2004 - link
I got my pc-dl with 2.8GHz Xeons with raptor drives in RAID0 to 3361MHz 160FSB with a dram clock of 200MHz. 4:5 It ran Sandra burnin overnight. Maybe my board is a newer revision. I read this article after I bought the Raptor so I didn't try to overclock it until yeaterday but it did and it runs well!!!!!FutureShock999 - Monday, October 6, 2003 - link
Wesley,A nice review, but I believe the wrong benchmarks. No one should buy a dual-processor machine to execute a single-threaded application faster, especially when that single proc is slower than others on the market. Dual-proc boards are bought to do multi-threaded stuff, either runnig a single multi-threaded application, or running several different single-threaded applications. In no place did I see benchmarks that explicitly looked like that.
As such, your review was a good cautionary tale for people that didn't KNOW the above, and hopefully will stop some people from spending a lot of money on a this board hoping to have a great UT setup.
Now if you had shown what it was like to play a game, encode media, and download a few gigs of content SIMULTANEOUSLY, then we could really see how this board stacks up to the competition you evaluated it against. And I think it might have beaten them rather handily...
Wesley Fink - Tuesday, September 9, 2003 - link
#23 -We recently changed our standard video card from nVidia's Ti4600 to the ATI RADEON 9800 PRO. Theoretically this should have no impact on encoding scores, but we reran all benchmarks with our new standard hadware on a few of the highest performing boards. Evan ran about half the new encoding benchmarks on the west coast, and I ran the other half on the east coast. As you can see our new results compare very well to each other.
I have no other explanation, but perhaps Evan can shed some light on this. I have used the new ATI Radeon 9800 PRO from day 1 and my benchmarks have been cumulative over the last couple of months with no dramatic change that you point out.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 9, 2003 - link
The 865/875 P4 boards in this test all perform 50% faster in the media encoding benchmark in this review than they did in the round-up a couple weeks ago.Has anyone else noticed this dicrepancy? The Abit IS7-G has gone from 64.45 fps to 104 fps. Both times they used a P4 3.0Ghz, 800mhz FSB, with HT enabled. Nothing seems to have changed except the encoding speed. I wish I could do that to my rig ; )
A 50% increase in as linear and consistent a benchmark as DivX encoding is simply astounding.
I just wanted to point this out to everybody around here.
Thank you for your time.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 9, 2003 - link
It' will not overclock with the SATA drives on the intel controller. BUT it will if you run them on the onboard promise controller. I have 2 WD Raptor's running RAID0 and the 2800/533's running @3250 100% stable.Anonymous User - Monday, September 8, 2003 - link
Which brings up the question about whether or not HT was enabled on it. And the fact is they used a regular consumer card for video Most workstations would have a workstation class card in them such as a Quadro, FireGL, or even a 3DLabs card in them. It all depends on the applications that one uses. Most normal people wouldn't use a dual machine for gaming anyways. They'd use them for graphical processing or media encoding or file serving and such. Just talk to those guys over at 2CPU.com they know what I'm talking about. ;)Anonymous User - Monday, September 8, 2003 - link
From the looks of it, there would be little if any reason to spend gobs of extra money on a system that is beat by AMD in gaming, and by single P4 siblings in high-end workstation tasks.