Benchmarks I
Dual-channel DDR looks good on paper, but how does it perform in reality ?. The MSI 'Granite Bay' motherboard proved to be a stable and speedy DDR-based chipset, let's see if the DFI can emulate or beat its benchmarks.
Pifast, our first practical test, simply calculates the constant Pi to the desired number of decimal places. I've chosen 10 million using the fastest method possible. Memory bandwidth has historically played a major part in this benchmark.
7 P4-based chipsets and 8 sets of results. The above graph highlights the effect that memory speed and timings have on certain benchmarks. The 2.8GHz P4 is being run +/- 10MHz each time (depending on the exact FSB of the motherboard in question). RAMBUS PC1066 leads the way with the 2 dual-channel DDR motherboards in close pursuit.
Next we'll turn our attention to MP3 encoding. We're benchmarking by encoding a 600MB+ 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.
MP3 encoding has never been terribly good in differentiating between chipsets, as it's largely memory bandwidth insensitive. The 2 dual motherboards seem to edge out the others by the smallest possible degree. 3-and-a-bit minutes for a full 600MB+ set of WAVs into 192kbps is impressive.
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.
Running a Granite Bay-based motherboard in single mode is, quite obviously, defeating the object. The difference between single and dual modes are around 16 minutes on this particular work unit. The DFI, quite pleasingly, manages to just oust the MSI version by a scant few seconds.
Next is DVD-to-DivX encoding. DivX4.12 with a 2-pass encoding of Gone in 60 seconds with an 1800kb/s bit rate. An average is calculated when the first VOB is complete. The borders are cropped to save encoding time.
Impressive numbers from the DFI motherboard. The i845E, when run in its officially supported mode, really does hamper the quad-pumped P4.
