System setup and testing notes
Those of you who read our RS482-M review will be no stranger to our test results, but this time around we're asking if AM2 is a worthwhile budget platform. Here are the RS482-M and (in blue) the RS485M-M's system setups, side-by-side.
| ECS RS482-M | ECS RS485M-M | |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 939 | AMD Athlon 64 3500+ AM2 |
| CPU speed | 2199.5MHz - 200MHz FSB | 2199.7MHz - 200MHz FSB |
| Memory | 2 x 256MiB Corsair VS512MKIT400 PC3200 (DDR1) | 2 x 256MiB Crucial CT3264AA53E PC4200 (DDR2) |
| Memory speed | 2.5-3-3-8 1T @ DDR-400 | 4-4-4-12 1T @ DDR2-488.8 |
| Graphics card(s) | ATI Xpress Radeon 200 256MiB HyperMemory (301/500MHz) | ATI Xpress Radeon 1150 256MiB HyperMemory (401/500MHz) |
| ATI Radeon X1300 PRO 256MB DDR2 PCIe x16 (594/396MHz) | ||
| Graphics driver | 8.243-060404a-033273E-ATI | |
| Chipset driver | Catalyst 6.2 Southbridge driver package | |
| BIOS | Beta version dated 03/07/06 | Beta version dated 28/06/06 |
| Hard drive | Seagate 160GB SATA (ST3160812AS) | |
| Optical drive | Sony DDU1615 | |
| PSU | FSP 300-60THN-P(PF) 300W | |
| Monitor | AG Neovo E-17A 17in TFT | |
| OS | Windows XP Professional SP2 | |
Testing software
- ScienceMark Memory Bandwidth
- ScienceMark Memory Latency
- Pifast calculation to 10M places
- HEXUS Cryptography
- KribiBench
- HEXUS WAV encoding
- HEXUS DivX encoding
- Cinebench 2003
For 3D performance we used our HEXUS custom benchmarks:
- Far Cry v1.33
- Quake 4 v1.04
- Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05
We also ran HDTach version 3.0.1.0 on the system for read and burst speeds over the SATA interface. Further, we also tried out the RS485M-M's USB2.0 performance in conjunction with a 160GB Western Digital IDE drive in an external Akasa enclosure.
Notes
The limited number of memory ratios for the controller on AM2 CPUs meant that our PC4200 (DDR2-533) memory, with the multiplier of our CPU, would only run at DDR2-488. At the time of writing Sempron 2800/3000+, Athlon 64 3800+ and Athlon 64 X2 4600/4800+ CPUs have multipliers that allow DDR2-533 memory to rum at its full rated speed.
We had to tune down the quality settings slightly for Quake 4 and Splinter Cell to get the tests to run with the integrated graphics, so they can't be directly compared to the PCIe card we tested with. Similarly, the integrated graphics ran the SM2.0 path for Far Cry, as opposed to SM3.0.
