i815 B-Step Tualatin Motherboard Roundup - July 2001

Overclocking

The oboards that supported any type of overclocking features were the ASUS TUSL2-C, Soyo SY-TISU and the Tyan i815T.  Of those three, only the Soyo board offered voltage adjustment. 

In terms of overclocked stability, the ASUS was more readily able to take our 1.2GHz Pentium III to 1.44GHz (160MHz x 9.0) but without any voltage adjustment we were unable to make the system stable at that speed.  The Tyan didn’t overclock well at all, it wasn’t able to boot at its max FSB speed of 157MHz.  The Soyo offered the greatest potential because of the core voltage adjustment options, unfortunately the ASUS seemed to offer greater stability at the higher FSB frequencies even in spite of this.  This is partially due to the fact that ASUS supplies a slightly higher voltage to the core than the processor requests (the CPU requests 1.475, yet the motherboard provides around 1.5V). 

The Test

For the performance tests we focused on three categories: Business/Office performance, professional 3D rendering/animation performance, and 3D gaming performance.  Due to the relatively small performance differences between the motherboards, the benchmark suite was limited to only three tests.  For a much more thorough evaluation of the Pentium III 1.2GHz consult our recent review. 

Do not compare these scores directly to those in the Pentium III 1.2 review as we are using a slightly different test setup.