MP3, DVD, Kribi, Raytracing, HDTach
Our next test is WAV-to-MP3 encoding. We're crunching just over 600MB of U2' Pop WAVs into 192kb/s MP3 format using LAME 3.92.
CPU grunt shows itself to be the determining factor here. At an educated guess, we'd need a 2.4GHz Athlon 64 to beat out the 3.2GHz Pentium 4. Bandwidth and latency play far smaller roles here.
Raytracing, via Realstorm's benchmark, has always been a favourite of AMD and especially new breed of 32/64-bit CPUs. In standard benchmark form, both the Biostar board put in excellent performances. Overclocked, the K8NHA eclipses the FX-51 again. We note just how close both chipsets are to one another.
KribiBench is an easy-to-use benchmark from Adept Development. It's a software (read subsystem) renderer that's capable of rendering amazingly complex scenes. The benchmark can be downloaded from here and features models with 16.7 billion polygons. The test is the rather easier JetShadow model with the realistic setting. Both boards show increasing similarites in performance again. It's a benchmark that just loves the P4. The 3.2GHz CPU just laps it up. What's more important is that the overclocked nF3 150 beats out the FX-51 again.
We ran a simple hard drive test to ensure that SATA support was working. HD Tach 2.70 was used to calculate the average, peak and low STR speeds. Firstly, the Biostar K8NHA Pro with the discrete VIA VT6420 RAID controller.
Pretty good. A smooth graph with an acceptable average read speed and decent CPU utilisation. The burst speed isn't too shabby.
The on-chip VIA VT8237 produced similar scores in the pure reading area. One area of concern was with the high CPU utilisation of >40%. It was consistent over a number of runs. The drive was the same one tested on the Biostar nForce 3 150. Kind of strange but repetitive.
