Benchmarks I
Starting off, as always, with SANDRA's synthetic unbuffered memory benchmark to see how our motherboards fare with bandwidth that takes no optimisations into account.
The i845PE-powered motherboards never seem to do well in this benchmark. They consistently lag behind the other two DDR333 motherboards on test. RAMBUS, quite naturally, takes the lead.
On to Pifast. It simply calculates the constant Pi to 10 million decimal places. Bandwidth, and lots of it, is required here.
Apart from the VIA P4X400, the DDR333-based motherboards all perform extremely similarly. Running the same memory speed, timings, and the same CPU (albeit at slightly varying speeds) gives us close results.
Next is DVD-to-DivX encoding. DivX4.12 with a 2-pass encoding of Gone in 60 seconds with an 1800kb/s bit rate over 2 passes. An average is calculated when the first VOB is complete.
RAMBUS seems to love this benchmark. The remaining 5 DDR motherboards all perform well. It's difficult to find a poorly-performing motherboard now. Each manufacturer appears to be able to extract decent performance out of the respective chipsets.
On to the OcUK SETI benchmark. It runs through a standardised work unit with an Angle Range of 0.417, one that is reasonably representative of the kind you will receive if you run SETI on a long-term basis.
The DDR chipsets are separated by a scant 2 minutes. RAMBUS, however, takes over 12 minutes out of the fastest DDR chipset. If SETI is your thing, get some super-fast RAMBUS running at 4x.
