Benchmarks II
DVD encoding is a favourite pastime of mine and many of our readers. Any increase in speed is most welcome as encoding is still a time consuming activity. We're encoding the Three Kings DVD in full-screen format (720x576), with black borders cropped. We're using XMPEG v4.20 and the DivX 5.0 CODEC, coupled with YUV2 spacing. Sound is not encoded. We take an average after 20,000 frames have been encoded.
Another close set of results highlight the lack of difference between any of our chipsets. It seems as if all the memory controllers present are able to satisfactorily supply bandwidth to the Pentium 4. We were initially intrigued to see if the P4PA could even be competitive. It certainly has been thus far. Indeed, one would have to resort to looking at the sticker on the motherboard to find out which one of our test group was in the case at any one time, such is the similarity in performance.
We next ran the Ocuk SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) benchmark, a rather tough work-unit with an angle ratio (AR) of 0.417. This one takes a while to complete, as it sifts through huge chunks of data in the hope of finding some inkling of Extra Terrestrial existence. One advantage in this benchmark is its ability to display results to within 1/10000th of a second, we've rounded the results up to the nearest second for the sake of brevity.
We're not surprised to see the P4PA trailing the SiS645 and I850 in this benchmark, their faster memory subsystems naturally excel at a memory intensive activity such as SETI. What we are pleasantly surprised with is the fact that the P4PA has thus far continually eclipsed the I845D, albeit by a small margin. They both use the same memory speed, PC2100, so the difference must lie in an ever so slightly better performing memory controller.
PCMark 2002 seeks to do for home and office applications benchmarking what 3DMark does for video card benchmarking. The CPU, memory, and hard drive are benchmarked and given a score at the end, let's see how we do.
We can largely discount the CPU and hard drive scores from our benchmark, they stayed constant throughout the test. The interesting benchmark is that of the memory. We see the P4PA scoring very well when considered from PCMark's point of view. It continues to impress us.
