System Specifications
| CPU: |
Intel PIV 2.8E 775LGA |
| CPU
Clock Speed: |
2.8GHz |
2.8&3.8GHz |
| Motherboard: |
ECS 915P-A
|
Asus
P5LD2-Deluxe |
| Memory: |
Corsair
TwinX PC4000 (2*512MB) |
Crucial
Ballistix PC2-5300 (2*512MB) |
| Memory
Timings: |
3-4-4-7-1 |
4-3-3-12-1 |
3-3-3-12-1 |
| Memory
Speed: |
400MHz (DDR) |
533MHz (QDR) |
533 & 680MHz (QDR) |
| Hard
Drives: |
80GB Western Digital
7200RPM SE 8MB Buffer; Maxtor 6Y160P0 160GB 7200RPM
|
| Video
Card: |
Asus
Extreme AX800XL-2DTV |
| Operating
System: |
Windows
XP Pro SP2 Direct X 9c |
| Drivers: |
Catalyst
4.7 |
| Cooler: |
Swiftech
H20-120 REV. 3 Liquid Kit |
| Case: |
CoolerGuys Windtunnel IV |
| Power
Supply: |
RaidMax
400Watt Power Supply |
| Game
Benchmarks: |
Unreal
Tournament 2004 (CPU timedemo) |
|
Half
Life 2 - Anandtech Canals Demo |
| Other
Benchmarks |
XMPEG
5.03 |
VirtualDub
1.6.4 |
|
LameMT 3.97 alpha 2 |
Pi Fast 4.2 |
DivX
5.21 |
|
Business
Winstone 2004 |
Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 |
|
TMPGEnc
Plus 2.59.47.155 |
Sysmark
2004 |
All non gaming tests were
run at a resolution of 1600*1200. For the game tests
the resolution was 640*480, to take away the video card as
a potential limiter. Sound was both disabled and enabled
for these tests to see how much impact the sound card has
on the average frame rate. For both games the lowest
quality settings were used as well. Sysmark was run
three times with the best of the closest two results being
used. Business Winstone and MCC Winstone were run using
default settings as well.
Our video tests follow the
same route I've used in the past few reviews. The video
is a 8555 frame rip of the original "Hitchikers Guide to
the Galaxy" DVD. In Xmpeg we took the VOB file
and converted it to a DivX video file, with no audio.
In VirtualDub we took the same video that had been converted
into a HuffYUV file and converted it to DivX without audio present
again. All the DivX files were encoded at 1500Kbps with
a keyframe every 30 frames. In TMPGEnc we took the HuffYUV
video and encoded it with sound with the default DVD preset
option. For the LAMEMT test we used the following command
line: "lame.exe -q 0 --vbr-new -V 0 -b 32 -B 320
--allshort --mt Track04.wav output.mp3". This creates
a variable bit rate audio file and uses multiple processors
if available.
Office Tests
Lets take a look at the two
sets of office benchmarks, in the form of Business/MCC Winstone
and Sysmark. First lets look at Sysmark which takes multiple
programs from everyday office use (MS Office, Photoshop, Dreamweaver)
and runs a script through them. The downside is that it
only spits out a score which is only useful in comparing to
the same tests. Lets see the results here though.
| Sysmark 2004: |
ECS 915P-A DDRI: |
ECS 915P-A
DDRII: |
Asus P5LD2-Deluxe
DDRII: |
Asus P5LD2-Deluxe
DDRII 3.8GHz: |
| 3D: |
178 |
179 |
176 |
232 |
| 2D: |
196 |
199 |
202 |
278 |
| Web: |
159 |
161 |
155 |
209 |
| Content: |
113 |
109 |
104 |
113 |
| Data: |
154 |
160 |
159 |
203 |
| Data Arranging:
|
134 |
138 |
139 |
168 |
| Overall Internet:
|
177 |
179 |
177 |
239 |
| Overall Office
Productivity: |
133 |
135 |
134 |
161 |
| Overall: |
155 |
157 |
155 |
200 |
Not much difference at stock
speeds between the 915P motherboard and the 945P motherboard.
Each is has points where it is slightly better than the other
but nothing of real note here. Overclocking helps the
score increasing the overall score by 29%, which is fairly
close to the 35% clock speed increase that overclocking gives.
The Internet portion of the test offers the best return on
the clock speed increase, as it increases percent for percent
in most cases. What though does Business Winston and
Mulitmedia Content Creation Winstone show us in regards to
this motherboards performance?
|
Test
|
ECS 915P-A DDRI |
Asus P5LD2-Deluxe
DDRII |
Asus P5LD2-Deluxe
DDRII 3.8GHz |
| Multimedia
Content Creation: |
23.6 |
23.9 |
30.8 |
| Business: |
16.1 |
16.9 |
20.1 |
What do we see with this
result? Like Sysmark there is minimal difference between
the two different motherboards/chipsets. There is a
5% improvement in Business Winstone, with the Asus board being
slightly faster here. The overclocking ability of this
board means that there is a 29% improvement in the scores.
Next lets look at some encoding tests to see if there is some
improvement between motherboards.
Encoding Tests
First we will look at MP3 encoding,
this should be simply CPU limiting. So lets see if there
are any differences between the two motherboards, and see if
the overclock does improve on a one to one basis.
We can see that there is no
difference between motherboards in this case at least at stock
clock speeds. Overclocking is an interesting result, as
the 35% clock speed increase gives you a 40% increase in encoding
speed. This could be that as the FSB/memory speed increases
the both logical cores get data when they need it. Lets
see if video encoding has any changes or acts like it does in
LAME.
