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Performance III
Pifast, Hexus' little custom benchmark that thrashes CPU cache, memory bandwidth and your FPU to calculate the value of Pi to 10 million places. Exciting stuff!
Pifast performance
We can't quite nip under 70s with the Leadtek but it manages to hold off the Asus by the smallest of margins to nudge in behind the Pifast behemoth that is the 3.06 and RDRAM. Without the Radeon to stop us needing the onboard graphics core, performance drops off very sharply, especially in single channel mode. Again, 2 sticks good, 1 stick bad, especially if you need to feed the IGP core. Performance isn't staggeringly slow, but the boost simply from arranging your memory configuration properly is one you can't ignore.
DivX encoding to round things off before we can talk about some more interesting stuff. High bitrate video being output by DivX 4.12 by way of Virtual Dub is what's going on here. We need good memory bandwidth and a strong CPU here, lots of math being done per frame to compress our source movie. Look for IGP performance to be a little weak and for the Leadtek and Radeon to go toe to toe with the Asus.
DivX encoding performance
We don't get burned so bad when we have to use the IGP core here, even in single channel mode. Dual channel and the IGP core and a nice CPU would make for a decent DivX encoding box. The Asus just beats out the Leadtek when using the Radeon 9700 but it's just by a hair. RDRAM, a 3.06 and HT enabled shows you how it's really done.
Performance Conclusion
So, what's performance like? With a discrete graphics card in the AGP slot, performance is great, right up there with the Asus. nForce2 really does the business on the AMD side of the x86 sand pit and it's definitely the chipset of choice. The Leadtek implements it well so there's no worries on the performance side of things when using an external card. IGP performance is a different matter. The core is pretty weak, it wouldn't hold up against a 'proper' GeForce4 MX due to the use of your system memory and the bandwidth hit that means (plus the lower mem clock).
However, as an integrated core against its integrated core peers it does well. There's no other integrated choice worth bothering about for AMD, nForce2 gives the best performance in that configuration. Depending on what the box would be doing, it's also not that much behind our Radeon 9700 Pro figures in some tests, the DivX encoding above comes to mind.
So performance isn't in question, the board is quick. Just feed it 2 sticks of matched memory, especially if you have to use the IGP graphics core. Otherwise you'll be stuffing a fast CPU in there just to make up for the performance loss. AMD CPU's get expensive at the high end, DDR memory is cheap just now, be smart.
Onto more interesting things.
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