Product Listing

MSI P6NGM (NVIDIA GeForce 7150/nForce 630i)

By Zachary Chan - 13 Oct 2007

Overclocking and Test Setup

Overclocking

  • FSB Settings: 100MHz to 625MHz (or 400MHz to 2500MHz quad-pumped)
  • DDR3 Settings: 400MHz to 1400MHz
  • PCIe Settings: 100MHz to 200MHz
  • Memory Voltage Settings: 1.80V to 2.00V (in 0.05V steps)
  • Multiplier Selection: Yes (unlocked CPUs only)

Our attempts to overclock the MSI P6NGM revealed an interesting issue with the board. Using our usual Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU, we were unable to overclock the P6NGM at all. Now take note, this is with a 1066MHz (266MHz base) FSB processor. The chipset is supposed to support a 1333MHz FSB, which means we should have at least been able to run our X6800 at 333MHz, but it didn't. However, when we plugged in a Core 2 Extreme QX6850, the board worked and correctly detected a 1333MHz FSB. Using the QX6850 instead, we were able to perform some slight overclocking, claiming a small victory of 350MHz. Considering that our board is an early sample with a beta BIOS, we had initially expected some hiccups along the way. Not that overclocking has ever been a forte of IGP chipsets, but we would expect that the retail boards will at least allow pushing 266MHz processors up to 333MHz. In any case, this is just minor annoyance that should be easily plugged as the board goes retail and the BIOS matures.


Test Setup

In terms of GPU performance at the moment, the only competitor that the GeForce 7150 has in the Intel market segment is Intel's older G965 Express chipset with the GMA X3000 graphics engine. Intel's newer G31 and G33 chipsets have a far inferior graphics engine to be of any real worthy comparison other than for standard productivity usage (their graphics engines are similar to the GMA 950). To this end, our benchmarking segment will pit the MSI P6NGM against the MSI G965MDH. We will also be emphasizing on the single-channel performance of the P6NGM by running the G965MDH in both single and dual-channel modes. This way, we will be able to determine just how true NVIDIA's claims are for its optimized single-channel performance against an Intel chipset. The test bed specifications listed below will be used in all benchmarking unless otherwise specified:-

 

MSI P6NGM – NVIDIA GeForce 7150/nForce 630i

  • Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor (2.93GHz)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 4-4-12 CAS 4.0 (Single-Channel only)
  • GeForce 7150 256MB – with ForceWare 163.71 drivers
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • ForceWare 163.71 beta set
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)

 

MSI G965MDH – Intel G965 Express

  • Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor (2.93GHz)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 5-5-15 CAS 5.0 (Single and Dual-Channel)
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • Intel GMA X3000 DVMT 256MB - with beta drivers 6.14.10.4864
  • Intel INF 8.1.1.1001 and AHCI 6.1.0.1022 driver set
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)


Additional Notes

  • The MSI G965MDH does not have manual memory timing controls, which forces our HyperX modules to run at 5-5-5-15. Users should take this into account in the next few pages, as the timings will also affect the performance of the G965MDH. The P6NGM is configured with the usual 4-4-4-12 clocks.
  • The ForceWare 163.71 package used in this review are beta drivers for the GeForce 7150/nForce 630i chipset. While the drivers work for the mGPU, Windows still detects several items that are not detected properly such as the SMBus and a 'Co-processor'. We did not notice any functionality loss over these, and deemed it fit to continue benchmarking.

Benchmarks

The following benchmarks will be run to determine the performance potential of the MSI P6NGM:-

  • BAPco SYSmark 2004
  • Futuremark PCMark05
  • SPECviewperf 9.0
  • Futuremark 3DMark05
  • Futuremark 3DMark06
  • AquaMark3

 

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