Benchmarks II
I'm now an active SETI-runner. SETI thrives on lots of memory bandwidth delivered by an efficient memory controller. I'm running the OcUK SETI benchmark. One advantage in this benchmark is it's ability to display results to within 1/1000th of a second, I've rounded the results up to the nearest second for the sake of brevity. You can download it here. Simply unzip and click on the runbench.bat and wait.
Time is given in hours, minutes, and seconds. You can see it took a while to complete. We see almost a 15-minute difference when changing the MAX2's memory timings from DDR266 to DDR356. It remains the pace-setting DDR motherboard so far.
DVD encoding next. 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 benchmarking CODEC of choice.
We gain around 1.5 FPS as we go from DDR266 to DDR356 memory. This may not sound like much, but it does add up over a 2 hour film. The MAX and MAX2 change places for once, with the Shuttle SiS648 close behind.
