Benchmarks I
Starting off with SiSoft SANDRA's unbuffered benchmark. I've ditched the buffered benchmark for the unbuffered one due to the latter being more representative of performance in real-world conditions.
The first aspect of note is just how much of a disability the on-board graphics imposes on available bandwidth. The ~1100/1100 scores are representative of a system running PC2100 and not PC2700 RAM. RAMBUS naturally leads the way by showing the SiS648 chipset and the Intel variety a clean pair of heels in this our first benchmark. Remember, the SB51G features an Intel i845GE chipset capable of supporting PC2700 RAM directly.
On to our first practical benchmark in Pifast. As you should by now know, it simply calculates the constant Pi to 10 million places. CPU power and masses of available bandwidth are keys here.
Rather unsurprisingly, RAMBUS running at PC1066 speeds takes top honours. What is impressive, however, is that the SB51G can just about oust a standard-sized SiS648 motherboard in this benchmark. It may be a small package, but it is anything but slow. Running on-board graphics, which take a chunk out of system bandwidth, leads to the slowest time of the bunch at 84.68s.
Next we'll turn our attention to MP3 encoding. We're benchmarking by encoding a 660MB custom WAV file (U2's Pop album, incidentally) into 192kb/s MP3 using the LAME 3.92 encoder and Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end.
Pretty much a tie here. That's to be expected as WAV - MP3 encoding is primarily a CPU affair. Faster CPUs are what's required for this benchmark.
