Benchmarks I
Personally I havent used an AMD system for some time so I am interested in how it performs. I resisted the temptation to make this an AMD vs INTEL review and have run all my benches in a variety of combinations so we can see how it performs for people in many categories.
During the benchmarking sound was disabled.
First up is SiSoft SANDRA's Memory benchmark.
Though the scores are close, running the memory in "Sync" mode proves to be the fastest. The one thing that is apparent is the lack of any performance hit when using the onboard graphics.
Pifast, another of our standard tests, simply calculates the constant Pi to the desired number of decimal places. I've chosen 10 million using the fastest method possible.
Again we see DDR266 memory notch another victory, and the advantages of the dual channel memory show.
The next test will be MP3 encoding. We're benchmarking by encoding a 638MB custom WAV file (U2's Pop album) into 192kb/s MP3 using the LAME 3.92 encoder and Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end. This btw is another standard test.
Literally nothing between them even using the onboard graphics.
DVD encoding next. I'm using 2-pass encoding via VirtualDub. Gone in 60 Seconds is the DVD of choice, resized to 720x304, precise bilinear and black borders cropped. YUV2 spacing is used and the bit rate is set to 1800 kbps. I encode a 24.05 minute section and calculate the average fps from there. DivX 4.12 is still my benchmarking CODEC of choice.
Things are as clear as mud... DDR266 is proving faster than DDR333, especially with 2 sticks of memory installed. As you can see from the graph, I didnt run the DVD encoding on all platforms as the results are not graphic dependant. More interesting to see what sort of overhead we had using the onboard rather than an add-on card.
Were not done though on with some more tests...
