Benchmarks II
MP3 encoding is almost a CPU only affair. The FPU units are taxed heavily in this test. I'm 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.
I ran this benchmark a number of times and the DDR400 result was generally a second quicker. The SiS648 DDR333 result flitted between 253 and 254 seconds. I can possibly attribute this to the 648 running the CPU at a slightly higher speed than the BD7II-R.
To check for basic IDE controller performance, I ran HDTach on the test Western Digital 120JB hard drive. A spiky graph usually indicates that the controllers aren't fully optimised yet.
That's amongst the smoothest HD Tach graphs I've ever seen from the WD 120GB drive. The result was similar after multiple runs. The busy 963 South Bridge seems capable in this respect at least.
The SiS648/963 combination appears to be more than competitive in pure CPU / memory tasks, let's now investigate if the AGP side of things is equally as good as we focus on gaming.
