Gaming Benchmarks

    UT2003 has been very demanding both on the video card as well as the CPU.  So using the HardOCP CPU benchmark at 640*480, how did this new motherboard do?

    Here we see that UT seems to like PEM and the lower timings of the Albatron board.  It performs better than the 865PE board in single channel mode, though the difference is less than one percent.  It can't quite reach the speed of the dual channel version of the 865PE, but still offers good performance in this test.  How about Jedi Knight II?

    Jedi Knight II is based on a modified Quake III engine that is really not video card limited anymore, but provides a perfect CPU limited game to test with.  So how does this new game perform in a game that is very memory bandwidth hungry?

    This is rather interesting, the Albatron motherboard offers a 5% increase in frame rate over the dual channel enabled 865PE.  Since there is already a decent difference between single and dual channel, it isn't as surprising that the tighter timings and PEM enhancements offer a large improvement.  That is not to say that it isn't surprising because the difference in bandwidth is fairly large.  Since this was very repeatable I must say that this is a very nice result for the Albatron and shows that the MSI board could use with some improvements to the compatibility of the memory, to allow for faster timings with PC4000.  Does this result carry on in our other tests, or is it more like that of the UT2003 tests?

Synthetic/3D Rendering Tests

    How does the Albatron board do it Pi Fast, a synthetic benchmark designed to calculate PI to any number of places.  Lets see if this board beats the rest of the other motherboards, including the Abit IS7 and IC7.

    What do we see with these results?  The Albatron board doesn't quite perform as well as the MSI 865PE in single channel mode, though the difference is less than one percent.  Otherwise the board performs within striking range of the other boards we have tested here, as this test isn't latency challenged but rather bandwidth challenged.

    Truespace is a very good beginner's 3D modelling application, as it has many of the features of the $1000+ programs, but at a much lower cost.  Using thet slightly older 4.2 version, we have created an image with both lens flares, some textures, and a high polygon count, and rendered it at 1600*1200 which takes up plenty of memory space (500+MB).  So lets see how this motherboard handles some slightly intensive rendering.

    What do we see with this rendering result?  The Albatron board does extremely well, almost beating the dual channel enabled MSI 865PE board.  The difference between those two results is less than 1/2 of a percent, thus is basically the same thing.  The Albatron board beats the single channel 865PE by almost 3%, which is most likely related to both the decrease in latency and the enabling of PEM.  What happens when we look at video encoding?

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