Benchmarks I
Let's start the benchmark ball rolling with Pifast. Pifast is a decent motherboard test due to the fact that we need an efficient memory controller to maximise performance. It's all about shifting data. Pifast calculates the constant Pi to the desired number of decimal places. I've set it to 10 million for our benchmark. Lower times are better.
Remember that the VIA P4B Ultra is running our test 2.8GHz CPU at over 20MHz faster than the next fastest motherboard. That will undoubtedly give it an artificially lowered time. PC1066 RAMBUS leads the way. Dual-DDR266 from the DFI motherboard eclipses the other DDR-based motherboards on test. Considering that the P4B is running system memory at roughly the same speed as the i845PE and SiS648, even though it's running the CPU a little faster, its time of 75.59 seconds is impressive.
How about WAV-to-MP3 encoding. Using a combination of the RazorLame front-end and LAME 3.91, we're encoding U2's Pop album into 192Kb/s MP3.
It's of little surprise that the P4B Ultra, running the CPU a little faster than the other motherboards on test, just shades this largely CPU-intensive benchmark. The results were consistent over a number of runs.
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 of the 2 passes is calculated when the first VOB is complete.
The VIA P4B Ultra is the only single-channel DDR-based motherboard that's able to cross the 30FPS barrier. DivX encoding just loves bandwidth, so that's why PC1066 RAMBUS and dual-channel DDR eek out comfortable leads.
Another bandwidth-loving benchmark is SETI. As each work unit can take multiple hours depending upon the system used, any time saved is crucial. Using a work unit with an angle ratio of 0.417, we get the following results.
The VIA P4B continues to do well here. We can perhaps explain its lead over the other two comparison DDR333 motherboards by its inflated running speed. Still, it's been competitive so far.
