Test Setup

ABIT KV8 Pro-3rd Eye K8T800 Pro: Athlon 64 S754 3200+ (10x200: 2GHz), 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 XL, AIW Radeon 9600 XT, 120GB Maxtor SATA 7200rpm, Windows XP SP1, VIA Hyperion 4in1 4.53, ATI Catalyst 4.10.

ABIT KV8-Max3 K8T800: Athlon 64 S754 3200+ (10x200: 2GHz), 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 XL, AIW Radeon 9600 XT, 120GB Maxtor SATA 7200rpm, Windows XP SP1, VIA Hyperion 4in1 4.53, ATI Catalyst 4.10.

MSI K8N Neo nForce 3 250Gb: Athlon 64 S754 3200+ (10x200: 2GHz), 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 XL, AIW Radeon 9600 XT, 120GB Maxtor SATA 7200rpm, Windows XP SP1, NVIDIA ForceWare 5.10, ATI Catalyst 4.10.

Test software will be:

- Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds, using the 32-bit 2004 version.

- The ZD Winstone suite is a script that runs a series of actions and calculates a final score that measures a PC's overall performance.

- Sysmark 2004 is BAPCo's latest revision of the mainstream office productivity and Internet content creation benchmark used to characterize the performance of the business client. It uses a number of real-world applications and runs them through a series of tests. We tested with the office, and content creation benchmarks.

- We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

- Bad Company - 10 from 9 was ripped into one 414MB .wav file. We then encoded that .wav file into a 320Kb/s sample rate MP3.

- We used an Animatrix file, titled , and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes, seconds, and lower is better.

Unreal Tournament 2003, Quake 3: Arena - Old and moldy, both games were run at 640x480 with minimal detail and sound disabled to test CPU performance.

All benchmarks were run a total of three times, with the average results shown here today. Sound was disabled at the BIOS level, and memory timings configured at 2-2-2-5 at DDR400.

SiSoft Sandra 2004 - CPU Arithmetic

SiSoft Sandra 2004 - CPU Multimedia

SiSoft Sandra 2004 - Memory

Except for the memory benchmarks, the KV8 Pro trails the nForce 3 powered K8N Neo by a slight margin in CPU and MMX. In all the cases, the KV8 Pro outpaces the KV8-MAX3.

Business Winstone 2004

In our first real-world script, we can see the KV8 Pro pulling out on top of the other two here. Will this trend continue with the rest of our benchmarks?