Benchmarks I
I always like to start off the benchmarking with Pifast. This Pi calculator just thrives on bandwidth. It's an excellent tool for differentiating between rival platforms based on a single CPU. I've set it to calculate Pi to the usual 10m places.
Not the most promising start in the world, is it ?. The on-board graphics take a reasonable toll on performance, coming in at around 4.5 seconds slower than with a dedicated AGP card. That's what shared memory use does for you. The time with a Radeon 9700 Pro installed isn't stellar either. Considering that VIA's own KT400 is running with the same CPU FSB, albeit with asynchronous memory at DDR333, the 8 second lead is hard to ignore. The nforce2 takes top honours.
Will it do any better in WAV-to-MP3 encoding ?. Encoding U2's Pop album into 192 kb/s MP3 format.
I've previously mentioned that WAV encoding is largely a CPU affair. That seems to be the case with a dedicated AGP card. However, when the SK41G is run with its on-board solution the time does drop more than I expected. I wouldn't be too worried about it at this stage.
You should know the order of benchmarks by now. Next is DVD-to-DivX encoding. DivX4.12 with a 2-pass encoding of Gone in 60 seconds with an 1800kb/s bit rate. An average is calculated when the first VOB is complete.
DVD, encoding, however, simply loves usable bandwidth. I'm a little concerned at just how far off the pace the SK41G is with the on-board VGA solution. I had hoped it would be a little closer to the pace set by the full-size KT400 and nForce2 motherboards. Remember that each motherboard is running the CPU at 133FSB. It's just the speed of the memory that's different.
30 minutes+ difference between fastest and slowest. Almost 20 minutes between the Radeon 9700 SK41G and nForce2.
