Intel D845PEBT2 Blue Mountain 2 (845PE): Intel's Enthusiast Board

Stress Testing

We ran as many stress tests as we could on the Intel D845PEBT2. We tested this board in several different areas and configurations, including:

1. Memory stress testing was conducted by running RAM at 333MHz with one bank full and again at 333MHz with both banks filled. Since they're weren't any overclocking options available, we couldn't conduct our usual round of overclocking stress tests.

2. Today we're introducing a new stress test into our suite, called Super Pi. Essentially, what Super Pi does is produce a calculation of pi up to a certain number of decimal digits. This is supposed to mainly stress the CPU, but it's also a good overall system stress test. In a way, this makes Super Pi very similar to Prime95.

We finally got to the Super Pi stress testing part of our experiments, and it was plainly obvious that the D845PEBT2 was easily able to handle everything Super Pi threw up. In case you're wondering, both Prime95 and Super Pi require the same amount of CPU resources (100%).

The Intel D845PEBT2 was an impressive memory performer too. This is despite the fact that we weren't able to overclock memory at all (no BIOS or software-level overclocking was available at time of publish) and despite the fact that there were only two DIMM slots available.

We used double-sided Corsair XMS CAS2 DDR400 memory running at 333MHz for our stress testing:

These are the most aggressive timings possible via the BIOS. These settings were stable during all of our stress testing, which included Prime95 torture tests, Super Pi tests, and all benchmark runs.

Now that it was clear that the D845PEBT2 was perfectly stable with one DIMM running at 333MHz CAS 2-2-2-5, we attempted to find out what would happen with two DIMMs. Here were the results:

As you can see from the table above, the Intel D845PEBT2 is able to maintain the exact same timings with two DIMMs as it did with one DIMM before. We ran the same stress tests with both memory banks filled as we did before when there was only one bank filled; Prime95 torture tests, Super Pi, and benchmark runs were all conducted continuously to make sure everything ran smoothly. Yet again, we encountered no issues.

By far the biggest selling point of the D845PEBT2 is the fact that it comes with Intel's top notch reliability and stability record when it comes to motherboards. Very few manufacturers have come close to matching Intel's performance in this regard, which has always been why Intel's motherboards have sold so very well.