Review: EPoX EP-4G4A

4 letter acronyms abound for the final look at individual performance in this review. LAME is a test of FPU power and overall media performance since it involves the conversion of PCM audio to the venerable MP3 format.

Chipset makes little difference here, it's all about CPU and more specifically FPU performance since there's a lot of FPU math going on during the conversion process. While the ALU logic on a Pentium 4 processor runs at twice external CPU clock (in the case of the 2.4B in this review, 4800MHz), the FPU unit enjoys 1 x CPU external clock and it can't quite manage the same FPU performance as the Thoroughbred. In terms of performamce in its group, the 4G4A+ is indentical in performance to the other 2 P4 based systems.

Will the same thing be observed in our final test, the OcUK SETI Benchmark?

Not the most accurate graph in the world so accept my apologies for that but after the figures have been rounded up or down, the EPoX takes a shared lead with the MSI 645E with the other 3 systems on test sharing 2nd spot. With the EPoX being tested at DDR266 speeds versus the MSI's DDR333 setup, this is good performance from the EPoX since SETI loves memory bandwidth. I'm not convinced that given a more accurate graph it would still have been the fastest SETI system on test but it was certainly quicker than 3/5 of the systems.

So what about performance overall?