Benchmarks I
Now let's see how it performs. During the benchmarking sound was disabled.
First up is SiSoft SANDRA's Memory benchmark. I have run this both as buffered an d unbuffered to show the difference in the bandwidth achievable.
As you can see there is a big difference between the scores. DDR333 mode obviously shows a higher figure and hence higher performance due to the Pentium 4 processor being able to make full use of the bandwidth available from the memory controller.
Pifast, another of our standard tests, simply calculates the constant Pi to the desired number of decimal places. I've chosen 10 million using the fastest method possible and using uncompressed output.
Not as fast as I expected and slightly above the time achieved with the sister chipset I845GE but well within normal margins and it shows the chipset and processor working well with each other.
The next test will be MP3 encoding. We're benchmarking by encoding a 638MB custom WAV file (U2's Pop album) into 192kb/s MP3 using the LAME 3.92 encoder and Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end. This tests raw FPU performance on the host processor and given the same processor, chipsets should perform very closely together.
Nearly identical scores proving that the chipset is allowing the processor to work well and that the processor is working to it's full capacity.
DVD encoding next. I'm using 2-pass encoding via VirtualDub. Gone in 60 Seconds 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 1800 kbps. I encode a 24.05 minute section and calculate the average fps from there. DivX 4.12 is still the CODEC of choice.
Video encoding performance is very similar to the other motherboards and chipsets on test which is to be expected around a standard CPU and memory technology such as the Pentium 4 and DDR SDRAM.
