Benchmarks I
We'll have a quick look at how SiSoft SANDRA sees the memory bandwidth potential of each combination. Using the integer benchmark.
With a theoretical 6.4GB/s on tap, the circa 5GB/s seems a little low. However, when viewed in relation to the competition it looks impressive. The i875BZ also managed an unbuffered benchmark of ~ 2650/2700 MB/s; far ahead of the competition.
Running Pifast now. 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.
I'm a little perplexed as to why the Canterwood, when run at 3.06GHz / 133FSB, is over 2 seconds slower than the Granite Bay offering. The only difference in memory timings is the tRCD value of 3 clocks compared to the 2 clocks of the compared MSI GNB MAX2-L; both boards run the CPU at identical speeds of 3058MHz. That aside, the Canterwood, when run at its optimum settings of 200FSB and DDR-400 memory, eclipses the XP3000+ as the stock Pifaster of choice; even with semi-relaxed memory timings.
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.
The MHz advantage of the 3.06GHz CPU just allows it to stay ahead of the 3.0GHz / 200FSB runners. The XP3000+ is the only protagonist to not make it under the 3-minute barrier.
Let's see how they fare in our SETI benchmark. A 0.417WU makes it an average unit. Time is in hours, minutes and seconds.
The XP3000+ is toppled from the top by the 200FSB Canterwood; a familiar theme now. It goes without saying that the time of 2:16:04 is the fastest stock (per specification) time we've seen. However, running the 3.06GHz CPU seems to put it slightly behind the Granite Bay motherboard again. We'll see the 2-hour barrier broken by a stock system this year, I'm sure of that.
