Test Setup
EPoX EP-5LWA+: Intel 3.73GHz Extreme Edition, 2 x 512MB Corsair
TWIN2X PC5400, ATI Radeon X850XT-PE, 160GB Seagate 7200.7, Windows
XP SP1.
ABIT Fatal1ty AA8XE: Intel 3.73GHz Extreme Edition, 2 x 512MB
Corsair TWIN2X PC5400, ATI Radeon X850XT-PE, 160GB Seagate 7200.7,
Windows XP SP1.
MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum: Intel 560 (3.6GHz), 2 x 512MB Corsair
TWIN2X PC5400, ATI Radeon X850XT-PE, 160GB Seagate 7200.7, Windows
XP SP1.
Going up against the EPoX EP-5LWA+ will be the ABIT Fatal1ty
AA8XE (another 925XE based board), and the MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum.
The setups all share the same peripheral components, except the
MSI 915P will be running a Pentium 4 560 rather than an Extreme
Edition CPU. Onboard audio was enabled in the BIOS for all the
boards, but not used during game testing.
Test Software is as follows:
SiSoft Sandra 2005 - Our standard synthetic benchmark
suite, updated to version 2005. While it doesn't provide real-world
information, it does give us a base for the rest of the tests.
Business Winstone and Multimedia 2004 -A scripted benchmark
using real-world applications. Higher numbers are better.
SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation - Another scripted
benchmark using real-world applications. Like the previous tests,
higher numbers are better.
PiFast - A
good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast
version 4.2, 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.
TMPGEnc
2.521 - We used an Animatrix file, titled The
Second Renaissance Part 1, and a WAV created from VirtualDub.
The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file
with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower
is better.
CDex Audio Conversion Wav to MP3 - CDex
was used to convert a 414MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times
are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.
Doom 3, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2003 & 2004 @ 640x480,
LQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card,
lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. These results
are real-world, and higher scores are better. Bench'emAll
was used to collect numbers from Far Cry and UT2004.
All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average
scores being displayed. Any system tweaks and ram timings were
configured to the best possible for each platform.
SiSoft Sandra 2005 CPU
SiSoft Sandra 2005 MMX
SiSoft Sandra 2005 Memory
Clock speeds are the main factors with the CPU and
MMX scores, while over on the memory side of things the 1066FSB
influences the scores. While we've experienced great overclocks
with the Fatal1ty, the EP-5LWA+ pulls ahead at stock speeds.
Business Winstone and Multimedia 2004
The EP-5LWA+ finishes on top of the Winstone tests
by a large margin.
SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation
Same trends with the Sysmark benchmarks, with the
EP-5LWA+ placing first in the Content Creation and Office tests.
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