Benchmarks I
Benchmarking of the various combinations begins with Pifast. It simply calculates the constant Pi to the desired number of places. 10 million is chosen for this test. If you want to run it for yourself, click here for the benchmark standings and download link. Just unzip and click on the .bat file.
The default XP1700 turns in an unimpressive time that just manages to squeeze under the 100-second barrier. Given a healthy shot of MHz and FSB speed, the XP1700 turns itself into the fastest Pifast calculator ever seen on Hexus. Pifast illustrates just what raw power can do when fully exploited on the capable nForce2 chipset.
How about WAV-to-MP3 encoding ?. We're benchmarking by encoding a collection of WAVs (610MB of U2's Pop album, incidentally) into 192kb/s MP3 using the LAME 3.91 encoder and Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end.
Here the increases gained in time by the steroid-pumped XP1700 are largely linear. Pure MHz has more of an impact here. Saving over 100 seconds in an exercise that lasts below 5 minutes is impressive, again.
Some may say that faster CPUs and greater bandwidth is all well and fine for relatively quick applications, but we need a lengthy benchmark to highlight the tangible gains afforded by a super-processor. With a number of users running SETI on a regular basis, and the lengthy time that each work unit takes, saving any time here is truly beneficial.
The graph above highlights performance in hours, minutes, and seconds. Gaining over an hour by simply adding a little voltage, a whole lot of clock speed, and buckets of bandwidth, who says that stable overclocking doesn't pay ?. We're inching ever closer to the magical 2-hour barrier.
DVD-to-DivX encoding. Using the updated DivX 5.03 Pro CODEC in conjunction with Virtual Dub 1.51. A single pass, on a quality basis, with a bit-rate set to 2000kb/s. An average FPS is calculated after the first VOB of American History X has been encoded at 720x384.
Fantastic bandwidth and a faster basic speed than any current XP processor means that this super-high-quality DivX setting is encoded in faster than real time.
