Benchmarks I
SiSoft SANDRA is a reasonable gauge of how well a chipset extracts potential memory bandwidth. The caveat this time is that matters are complicated by having two rival processors that work in differing ways.
Let me take a minute to explain the above result. It will give you a grounding as to how we arrive at certain figures. The MSI KT3 Ultra2 is running main system memory at 166MHz. You would expect a SANDRA score of around 2500/2500. The reason we are limited to around 2100MB/s lies in the Athlon processor itself.
The processor sits on a 133MHz FSB, allowing it to use 2133MB/s bandwidth (2x8x133). What Sisoft Sandra is measuring here is not the potential speed of the memory, but rather how much memory the Athlon, limited by its DDR266 FSB, can use. The situation is different for the Pentium4, however, as it uses a quad-pumped FSB. The system memory can be fully utilised by the processor. Indeed, it wants for more.
Let's move on to how they tackle our first practical test, Pifast. Pifast simply calculates the constant Pi to a set number of decimal places. A fast FPU helps here. I've chosen 10 million decimal places as a benchmark.
The sheer brute FPU strength of the Athlon XP2100, together with the MSI KT3 Ultra2, ensure that it is victorious over the 2.26GHz P4. The greater bandwidth of the P4 cannot help it much here.
Next we'll turn our attention to MP3 encoding. We're benchmarking by encoding a 638MB custom WAV file (Moby's Play album, incidentally) into 192kb/s MP3 using the LAME 3.92 encoder and Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end.
WAV- MP3 encoding is usually an FPU-only affair. The potency of the XP2100 processor and MSI KT3 Ultra2-BR is revealed once more.
Another media-related task that many of us indulge in is DVD - DivX encoding, I certainly have been doing a great deal of late. Once again, I've changed my benchmark suite to something I feel better reflects true performance.
I'm now using a quality-driven approach. 2-pass encoding via VirtualDub. Three Kings is the DVD of choice, resized to 720x304, precise bilinear and black borders cropped. YUV2 spacing is used and the bit rate is set to 1700 kbps. I encode a 15-minute section and calculate the average fps from there. DivX 4.12 is still my CODEC of choice.
The P4 has always been king-of-the-hill in DVD encoding, not that much changes here. The MSI's performance is credible, however. Note that these are the results for one-pass encoding, You would practically need to halve the FPS to calculate the overall encoding speed.
