SiSoft Sandra 2005
While the debate between DDR and DDR2 is ongoing, for the most part AMD and DDR has been taking this test, will that continue with Intel's latest chipset offering? Granted this is a synthetic result, but it should give us a nice idea of what the boards can do.
In CPU arithmetic, we can see the clock speed of the Intel 640 taking over, the 2GHz speed of the 3200+ just isn't enough to overcome, although a good showing on Dhrystone numbers.
The memory benchmark goes the way of the faster Intel 640 as well, by a substantial margin I might add. Does this mean the improved 975x DDR2 communication has caught up with AMD? If this is any indication, I would say so.
PiFast
With all of what happened in the above synthetic test, you would think this a no-brainer, think again, somehow, ECS/AMD inched out a near 3 second victory.
TMPGEnc MPEG Encoding
With SSE3 built into the Venice cores, we are seeing the AMD times drop significantly in these scores. To this end, the ECS outperforms the Asus, most likely due to that memory advantage we saw in earlier tests. None the less, it amazes me that a processor at 2.0GHz is keeping pace with, and outperforming, a processor that is more then 50% faster (GHz wise that is).
Sysmark
This is a newer test for Viperlair 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, power point and Macromedia flash etc. Something one might actually do (well, maybe with the exception of Front Page). It appears that the slower clock speed takes it toll on this test suite, as the Asus soundly outperforms the ECS.
Subsystem Testing
The first thing we'll check is the audio. We downloaded and installed to test its CPU utilization.
CPU utilization was minimal throughout the DirectSound 2D and DirectSound 3D tests. With an average CPU utilization of 7.39% and 8.79% respectively, the Asus did a nice job of delivering HD sound. This is minimal when realizing the minimum CPU that is probably going to go in this is @ ~2.8GHz, add to that, we are now doing HD Audio with 8 channels compared to the nF2's solution, you can see the RealTek Audio chipset performs very well on this motherboard. With that said, the RealTek solution on the ECS does outperform, so it appears the 975x chipset has not yet caught up to the nF4 in this arena.
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