Benchmarks I
Starting off with SiSoft SANDRA's unbuffered benchmark.
The unbuffered benchmark takes memory timings and optimisations into greater account when calculating available bandwidth. With that in mind, the SOYO DRAGON does well when used with memory running at DDR333. The performance at DDR400 was abysmal irrespective of settings (930/940). RAMBUS running at PC1066 speeds still rules the roost.
Let's see how this bandwidth effects our first practical benchmark in Pifast. As is the norm, we'll be calculating the constant Pi to 10m places. Usable bandwidth is key here.
The DRAGON does surprisingly well here considering we're using DDR333 memory. It's the fastest time I've seen from a DDR-based motherboard to date. The SiS648 is ousted by almost 2 seconds here. The monstrous bandwidth of PC1066 RAMBUS ensures an easy victory.
Next we'll turn our attention to MP3 encoding. We're benchmarking by encoding a 610MB custom WAV file (U2's Pop album, incidentally) into 192kb/s MP3 using the LAME 3.92 encoder and Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end.
I eluded to the fact that the SOYO runs the CPU at the slowest actual speed of the three test motherboards. It's of no surprise, then, that it's the slowest of the bunch, albeit marginally. The results were repeatable.
