Benchmarks II
Next up, let's see how our protagonists deal with DVD - DivX encoding. DivX4.12 with a 2-pass encoding of Gone in 60 seconds. An average is calculated when the first VOB is complete.
The bandwidth-eating properties of on-board graphics rears its head once again as it becomes the only configuration not to exceed 28fps. The Shuttle, once again, proves that it can compete with top-end, full-size motherboards. It simply performs to roughly the same level as any DDR333-based chipset irrespective of its size.
Now on to SETI. I've been running SETI for some time now and every second literally counts. It's the OcUK benchmark available here. Just unzip and click on the runbench.bat. Then wait a while.
Pretty much what we expected. SETI is an activity that's ruled by bandwidth if the CPU speed is kept constant. That's why RAMBUS running at PC1066 speeds does so well. Conversely, running with memory-hogging on-board graphics reduces our time by over 10 minutes when compared to running the same SB51G with a Radeon 9700 Pro. The fact that the times are near what I expected leads me to believe that no CPU throttling was taken place.
