MSI 694D Pro Dual Socket-370 Apollo Pro133A ATX

CliBench: Back to Basics

CliBench Mk III SMP 0.7.10 is a low level, synthetic benchmark targeted at multiple processor systems.  The size of the CliBench Mk III SMP 0.7.10 is just about 500KB, and it contains eight major tests: Dhrystones, Whetstones, Eight Queens, Matrix Operations, Number Crunching, Floating Point Unit, Memory Throughput, and Disk Throughput. 

The CliBench Mk III SMP 0.7.10 is a very powerful test since it supports up to 128 processors, which is way more than we need here.  Before you start the test, it will ask you to put in the number of threads you want to start, with the recommendation that you start as many threads as as you have processors.  That way, each processor will take up one thread and perform all the operations in parallel.

The Test

In recent times, choosing a motherboard cannot be completely determined by a Winstone score. Now, many boards come within one Winstone point of each other and therefore the need to benchmark boards against each other falls. Therefore you should not base your decision entirely on the benchmarks you see here, but also on the technical features and advantages of this particular board, seeing as that will probably make the greatest difference in your overall experience

Even though the 694D Pro has been in the market for more than six months, it still delivers decent performance figures, although not outstanding.  Both SYSMark 2000 and Business and Content Creation Winstone 2001 scores match closely with our other reviews. 

Quake III Arena score is interesting, since it is slightly lower than tests we have done on boards using the Apollo Pro133A chipset.  During our original coverage of SMP on the Apollo Pro133A, we have discussed the fact that by enabling SMP support in Quake III actually slows down performance in many cases. This may be a video card driver issue or a bug in the game, although this is not clear at the moment. 

The advantage of the 694D Pro, being probably the first dual Apollo Pro133A board, is that we can use it as a reference for our new test benches.  Since this is our first time to use the Benchmark Studio by CSA Research and CliBench Mk III SMP 0.7.10 tests, it’s hard for us to judge the performance of a board using figures generated by these two tests.  However, from the other performance figures we obtained on the 694D Pro, it’s safe to take the scores of those tests as a reference point, and see how the upcoming contenders stack up.

Final Words

There is no doubt that dual processor systems are getting more common.  With the help of the integrated SMP support inthe VIA Apollo Pro133A, it can further help to lower the cost and make dual processor systems more affordable. 

The MSI 694D Pro is a board that has been on the market for more than six months.  Six months is a very long time in the rapidly changing computer market, yet the 694D Pro is still able to provide us with decent features and performance. 

The 694D Pro, even at this point, is still providing us with a handful of very useful features, including Firewire and a second IDE controller.  It also gives you a lot of overclocking options to push your chips to the limit while being extremely stable.    It does have its downside such as the lack of Ultra ATA 100 support by the South Bridge and RAID support.

By judging the pros and cons, the 694D Pro is probably getting a little bit long in the tooth and is not really a best buy anymore.  Fortunately, MSI is already a step ahead and has come out with a new successor that we will touch on very soon.   For now, we’ll take the 694D Pro as our reference for comparing other dual processor motherboards that we test in the near future.