Benchmarks I
It looks good, has a comprehensive BIOS, but the all-important question is how it performs. Let's start analysing by first running Pifast. As you'll know our Pifast benchmark calculates the constant Pi to 10 million places using the fastest (Chudnovsky) method. Speed and usable bandwidth are the drivers here.
Both AMD test platforms comfortably nudge past the comparative Intel offering. Why is the SOYO a little faster than the EPoX (even though they use very similar timings) ?. The answer probably lies in the fact that the SOYO is running our test XP2400 at 2010MHz, whilst the EPoX plays it firmly by specification at 2000MHz.
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.
The 1-second lead can perhaps be explained away by our hypothesis above. The Athlon, running at ~ 2GHz, comfortably beats the 2.53GHz P4. 610MB crunched in a little over 3 minutes, nice.
Whilst WAV-MP3 encoding is largely a CPU affair, DVD-to-DivX encoding requires lots of bandwidth and platform optimisations. Benchmarked using the DivX4.12 with a 2-pass encoding of Gone in 60 seconds. 1800kb/s bit rate is used. An average, once both passes have been run, is calculated when the first VOB is complete.
More importantly for us here is the fact that the SOYO continues to hold a slender lead over the EPoX offering. It's nothing to write home about, though.
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.
The trend seems to continue. The important aspect here is that the SOYO was super-stable during testing.
