Epox 8KRA2+ (KT600): KT600 Hits the Streets

Epox 8KRA2+: Stress Testing

We performed stress tests to the 8KRA2+ in several different areas and configurations, including:

1. Chipset and motherboard stress testing, conducted by running the FSB at 215MHz; and
2. Memory stress testing, conducted by running RAM at 400MHz with one DIMM slot filled and at 400MHz with all three DIMM slots occupied at the lowest timings possible.

Front Side Bus Stress Test Results:

As usual, we ran a large load of stress tests and benchmarks to ensure the 8KRA2+ was absolutely stable at each experimented, overclocked FSB speed. We ran our standard array of stress tests, including Prime95 torture tests, which were run in the background for a total of 24 hours.

We also proceeded to run a number of other tasks, such as data compression, various DX8 games, and light applications like Word and Excel, while running Prime95 in the background. Finally, we re-ran our entire benchmark suite, which includes Sysmark 2002, Quake3 Arena, Unreal Tournament 2003, SPECviewperf 7.0, Jedi Knight 2 and XMPEG. In the end, 215MHz FSB was the highest overclock speed that we were able to achieve on the 8KRA2+ using our conservative overclocking setup without encountering reliability issues.

Memory Stress Test Results:

This memory stress test is very basic, as it simply tests the ability of the 8KRA2+ to operate at its officially supported memory frequency (400MHz DDR) and at the lowest supported memory timings that our Corsair TwinX LL modules support:

It’s not surprising to see that the 8KRA2+ achieved such low memory timings with just one memory module running at 400MHz DDR.

The following memory stress test is obviously a bit more strenuous on the memory subsystem than most memory stress tests, since it tests the rare occasion that a desktop user will install three DIMMs running at DDR400, at the most aggressive memory timings available in the BIOS:

These are fairly decent memory timings, considering all memory banks are occupied and running at 400MHz DDR. However, we’ve certainly seen better timings, especially from dual channel DDR motherboards. All in all, these results really aren’t that poor.

We tested all these memory timings using several stress tests and general applications to guarantee stability. We initiated the tests by running Prime95 torture tests; a grand total of 24 hours of Prime95 was successfully run at the timings listed in the above charts. We also ran Sciencemark (memory tests only) and Super Pi. All three stress tests could not make the 8KRA2+ fail at the timings listed in the above charts.