Benchmarks I
Starting off with SiSoft SANDRA's memory benchmark. Although not a perfect indicator of potential performance, it does give us some insight into how well the memory controller is functioning
The Shuttle AS45GTR falls a little behind its chipset stablemate in this synthetic test. The i845E chipset, running at DDR-354 speeds, take an advantage here. If I had felt comfortable at DDR-400, I'm sure the results would have comfortably eclipsed the IT7's.
How does this increased bandwidth translate into real-world performance ?, let's run Pifast and find out. Pifast simply calculates the constant Pi to a set number of decimal places. A fast FPU and oodles of bandwidth are the drivers here. I've chosen 10 million decimal places as a benchmark.
I've chosen to start the graphs from zero to show just how little real-world difference there is in these results. Sure, one is faster than the other, but for all intents and purposes, they can be grouped together.
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.
Once again, WAV - MP3 encoding is seemingly oblivious to increases in bandwidth. Sheer MHz count here.
On to DVD - DivX encoding using a quality-driven approach. 2-passes crunched through Virtual Dub with the DivX 4.12 CODEC. A bitrate of 1500 was used on a segment of the Three Kings DVD. Resolution was 720x304 with borders cropped. Average FPS calculated over a 15-minute run.
Another similar set of results here. The AS45GT, however, keeps its nose in front of the SR7-8X when run at the same CPU FSB and memory speed.
