TMPGEnc MPEG Encoding

We will encode a 150mb AVI file to MPEG2 (a somewhat realistic chore as DVD's are MPEG-2). For the AVI to MPEG-2 I used a bitrate of 5000k/Sec, as this is the midrange for a DVD, which is typically between 1000k/Sec to 10,000k/Sec. I used a frame size of 720x480 (DVD Std) and 16:9 NTSC. Note that lower scores are better.

Lower times are better

The ASUS motherboard was outperformed by the AI7 in these tests, not by much, but enough if you do lot of video encoding.

Business Winstone 2004

This is a new test for VL, and from what I could see running, well flying by, as the test's proceeded, appears to be a real world attempt. This benchmark launches MS Office applications creating web pages and moving pictures and text in-between word, excel and power point. Something one might actually do (well, maybe with the exception of Front Page).

At the stock 2.4GHz speed, the AI7 outperforms the P4C800-E, by one point.

Unreal Tournament 2003

UT2K3 s a real system killer and can bring many systems to its knees. We used the [H]ardocp UT2003 Benchmarking utility version 2.1, which are excellent tools in testing various resolutions and detail levels. We selected the CPU test, which uses the dm-inferno map.

The AI7 performed well in UT2003 tests, outperforming the P4C800-E by just over 1% at overclocked speeds, but trailing at stock speeds by just under 2%.

Subsystem Testing

The first thing we'll check is the audio. We downloaded and installed Audio Winbench to test its CPU utilization. CPU utilization was fairly high throughout the DirectSound3D tests. CPU utilization never got to 15%, but it did average in the 8% - 11% range, which is a lot higher than the <2% averages we've seen with the nForce 2. It's not the end of the world, given that the slowest CPU you would ideally be using is a 2.4GHz "C", but we would have liked to have seen lower numbers this late into the Realtek chipsets lifecycle.

This is a synthetic benchmark though, and since I know all of you enjoy a game or two, let's see how the sound will affect UT 2003 performance.