Benchmarks I
We've seen the board in some detail, now let's see how it benchmarks. It'll be compared to the i845PE chipset in the form of the ABIT BH7 and SOYO P4-I motherboards both running single-channel DDR333 memory, and to the i845E, running single-channel DDR266 RAM.
Running Pifast v41 first. It simply calculates the constant Pi to the desired number of places. 10 million is chosen for this test. If you want to run it for yourself, click here for the benchmark standings and download link. Just unzip and click on the .bat file.
Considering that the GNB MAX2 is running our test 3.06GHz HT CPU equal slowest at 3058MHz, it quickly shows the single-channel DDR chipsets who's boss. Pifast loves memory bandwidth and the dual channel deliver it in spades.
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 3.91 encoder and Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end.
MP3 encoding tightens the pack back up. Pure MHz grunt is more useful.
DVD-to-DivX encoding. Using the updated DivX 5.03 Pro CODEC in conjunction with Virtual Dub 1.51 (P4 optimised). A single pass, on a quality basis, with a bit-rate set to 2000kb/s. An average FPS is calculated after the first VOB of American History X has been encoded at 720x384.
The 22:21 VOB was completed in 21m 39s, 27 seconds faster than the ABIT in second place. That's with a 10MHz clock deficit.
Another memory-dependant benchmark in SETI. Running an entire 0.417 angle work unit.
Bandwidth matters on a quad-pumped processor.
