MP3, DVD, KribiBench and Raytracing
AMD has made overtones suggesting that pure MHz is a poor method in determining overall performance. Whilst that is eminently true for most modern applications, programs that require extensive use of computational skills will undoubtedly benefit from raw clock speed. That's why the Shuttle SB65G2 is a fast WAV cruncher.
The test here was to encode the first VOB of American History X using a bitrate of 1000kb/s. Benchmark mode was limited to the first 5,000 frames and no sound was encoded. DivX Pro 5.05 was used. Black borders were cropped too. A Pentium 4 benefit, and by inference a SB65G2 benefit.
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 features models with 16.7 billion polygons. The test is the rather easier JetShadow model with the realistic setting. The SB65G2 is just a few percent behind the class-leading Canterwood.
Realstorm's Raytracing benchmark prefers AMD's architecture. Again, a decent showing from the feature-packed cube.
On a separate note, HDTach 2.61 showed no anomalies or idiosyncrasies with respect to drive performance. Both a 40GB PATA and a 120GB SATA drive produced the kind of smooth graphs we're used to seeing. Burst speed was comparable to any other chipset's.
