ASUS P5GDC Deluxe Motherboard, 1GB Kingston HyperX PC2-5400, Intel Pentium 520 (800MHz FSB, 2.8Hz, HT), ASUS N5900 Extreme 128mb, Hitachi Deskstar (IBM Deskstar renamed) 80GB 8MB buffer 7200 RPM SATA Drive, Samsung PUMA80 80GB 8MB buffer 7200 RPM ATA-100, Windows XP SP2, Forceware Detonator 61.77
Test software will be:
(AVI to MPEG2 encoding)
Unreal Tournament 2004
Comparison Systems
I will be comparing the ASUS P5GDC Deluxe to the previously reviewed ASUS P5AD2 Premium, and an ABIT AI7 (Intel 865P Chipset). Those systems Specs are:
ASUS P5AD2 Premium: Intel P4 560, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC2-5400 Pro, ASUS AX600XT, 120GB Seagate SATA 7200rpm, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 4.8.
ABIT AI7, Intel P4 2.8E, 2x512MB Kingston HyperX PC4300, ATI 9600xt, 80 GB WD SATA 7200rpm, Windows XP SP2, ATI Catalyst 4.8.
SiSoft Sandra 2004
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 at stock 2.8GHz speeds as well as 3.5GHz Overclocked speed.

SiSoft CPU

SiSoft Memory

SiSoft MultiMedia
The results are nothing short of shocking, the Springdale chipset keeps pace with and in some results outperforms the 915P Chipset in almost every category, with the memory benchmark being the most drastic separation. Even the 925 Chipset does not keep pace with the overclocked Springdale, and it still has a 100MHz CPU edge on it at that point. This could very well be the introduction of issues inherent due to the higher latency's required for DDR2.
PiFast
A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast version 4.3, by Xavier Gourdon. 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.

Time in Seconds, Lower is Better
This is an interesting chart, the AI7 scores on par with the 915 and 925 chipset. It appears as though we are seeing a trend in that there is little difference between the Socket 478 Version of the 2.8E from the LGA-775 version.
TMPGEnc MPEG Encoding
Video encoding is a taxing chore, and we'll be testing the P5GDC Deluxe using TMPGEnc 2.521 to encode a 150mb AVI file to MPEG2 (a somewhat more realistic chore as DVD’s are MPEG2). For the AVI to MPEG2 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.

Time in Minutes, Lower is Better
Finally we are seeing an advantage to the newer chipsets, as across the board they are finally outperforming the Springdale.
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