TMPGEnc is a very good quality MPEG-2 encoder, and is fairly inexpensive to purchase.  It is also multithreaded making it a good CPU and motherboard benchmark.  Lets see how this motherboard handles encoding MPEG-2 files.

    We can see some interesting things come up here.  At stock speeds the Asus board is slightly slower than a DDRI based 915P board, but is beat by the DDRII based 915P board by 4.7%, which may be an anomaly but was a repeatable one in our tests.  When overclocked we see a 16% increase in real FPS and a 38% increase in CPU time FPS.  What does this mean?  When overclocked this board is highly inefficient, with a average CPU usage of 48% in Task manager when overclocked, and 57% when not overclocked.  This means that the CPU is working as hard as ever but its not really translating into a shorter encoding time.  Lets move to XMpeg to see how this motherboard fairs here.

    We note that there is less than a 2% difference between the stock clock speeds, with the Asus board coming in second to the DDRII equipped 915P board, though this means nothing.  Overclocking gives you a one to one increase in performance per clock speed.  Overall a similar result to the LAME results but not quite the same overclocking improvement.  What happens when we take away all special optimizations using VirtualDub and encoding in DivX.

    Again similar results to the previous test, with a 1% variation in frame rates between the stock clock speed results.  Overclocking also gives us a 35% increase in frame rate making this a CPU bound test.  Lets now look at a few other tests one synthetic and two current games.

Other Benchmarks

    First we will take a quick look at Pi Fast, which as the name states calculates Pi quickly.  We calculated 10,000,000 places of Pi and looked to see how long it took.  This should also be a CPU bound test but lets see the results.

    There is a difference between the stock speed motherboards, but is still fairly small.  When compared to the DDR1 915P board the Asus is about 3.7% faster, but comparing to the same 915P board but with DDRII the difference drops to less than 1.5%.  Overclocking gives a 33% decrease in time used, which is pretty close to the 1% clock increase to 1% performance increase.  Lets see if either of the games can show a greater than 3% difference between the different motherboards.  First we'll look at UT2004.

    What can we see from these results?  Firstly that the Asus board does perform slightly better at stock speeds than the ECS board.  Overclocking gives a 29% boost in frame rate at this resolution anyway.  Looking at this from a sound card perspective we see some interesting results.  The ECS board uses the CMI9880 CODEC and loses 17% of its average frame rate by enabling the sound card in the BIOS and turning on Hardware Audio in UT.  The Asus board, using the ALC882M CODEC loses between 37% and 42% of its performance by doing the same thing.  While this percentage goes down as the resolution increases this is still an alarming result.  Does this board perform better in Half Life 2?

    Again we similar results with the sound disabled   At stock speeds the DDRII and Asus board give an additional 7% in the way of average frame rate.  Overclocking gives a 29% increase again which doesn't scale perfectly with the clock speed increase but still is pretty good.  Moving on to the sound cards, the ECS loses 12% of its frame rate by enabling sound at a hardware level as well as software.  The Asus board loses between 23% and 32% of its average frame rate by turning sound on. 

Conclusion

    We've looked at many aspects of this board, so what can we conclude?

    First taking a look at the package and what is inside the package.  The box itself is fairly plain, with a white background with the most prominent things being the AI Life logo and the model number.  Once we open up the box then we see what Asus has done with this system.  At first glance it looks like they have included everything you will ever need in a computer.  From cables to connectors to manuals.  What they give you allows you to use most of the onboard connections.  Though I would have liked to see another USB backplate, but they may be thinking of case front USB ports or that you have extra connectors already.

    Now the motherboard itself.  It simply has quite a lot of connections, 6 SATA headers, 3 IDE headers, 2 PCIe x16 slots, Firewire and assorted other connectors.  Space is not really a problem as power cables are kept out of the way and the RAM slots do not come in contact with PCIe video cards (at least the ones I have).  The four pin connector on the motherboard, for those without newer power supplies is a good addition, as it allows older power supplies to provide enough power for this motherboard.

    The BIOS was also very useful, with most of the overclocking time being spent in the JumperFree menu.  Here it allows for automatic or manual overclocking, and manual overclocking offers quite a few tweaking options to get the most out of your system.  We were able to make it to 272MHz FSB with our PIV 520, and were probably held back by the power supply I have.

    Now the performance of this motherboard.  For the most part in our 'Office' benchmarks and our video encoding tests the two motherboards performed fairly close, within 1-2%.  Only three programs showed a marked difference between the two motherboards, TMPGEnc, UT2004 and Half Life 2.  In TMPGEnc the Asus board was slower in real time then the ECS board, while CPU time was more or less equal.  Overclocking there was an odd occurrence as the average CPU usage during encoding dropped, instead of staying the same.  In the game tests we saw between a 5-7% increase in average frame rate from the Asus board in comparison to the ECS board.  However in those same tests we saw another interesting occurrence, the onboard sound of the Asus board lost between 20-40% of the boards' frame rate compared to the 12-17% losses incurred by the ECS board.

    Price is the last variable in our conclusion.  This motherboard has a few things that make it fairly unique at the moment.  The dual PCIe x16 slots makes it look like a nForce SLI motherboard, though it can't do SLI at this time.  The amount of connectors is also harder to match it with.  Its price range, which is around the mark (at the moment) puts it close to the basic 945P based motherboards, while it carries some of the features of the higher priced nForce boards its price is rather good.  That is for the standard version, that comes without the WiFi-TV option which adds a good $50 (US) to put it in the nForce SLI price range.

Good Points

Bad Points

Final Words

    This board comes with enough features to make it a very useful board, though the price isn't extremely high.  Good overclocking and decent performance mean that this board is one of our recommended ones, just beware of the onboard sound in games.

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