Performance

Polywell MiniBox: Athlon 64 X2 3800+, ASUS A8N-VM, 1GB Super Talent Ram, 2x250 WD, 6150 GPU and ATI X1800 XL

Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS: Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 1GB Super Talent Ram, 2x250 WD, 6150 GPU and ATI X1800 XL

We will be comparing the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS against the Polywell MiniBox which is armed with an ASUS A8N-VM motherboard (6150 GPU/430MCP). The ASUS board uses identical chipsets so the playing field will be fair as the rest of the peripherals will be the same. For the gaming tests, we'll be using both the onboard 6150 and ATI X1800 XL. Therefore, the results shown today will be with the onboard video enabled, as well as disabled with an ATI card in its place.

Onboard audio was enabled in the BIOS for both of the boards, but not used during game testing. Any system tweaks and ram timings were configured to the best possible for each system. All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average scores being displayed.

Test Software is as follows:

SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation - A scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Like the SiSoft 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 2004 @ 1280x1024, HQ Settings w/Bench'emAll - We normally test at low resolutions for motherboards and systems but decided to go with something higher since we wanted to test the onboard video. We will say it now that we do not expect a good showing but chose these settings to demonstrate the gap with onboard and a high quality discreet graphics card.

Sysmark Office 2004

As we can see above, the performance is a little better when we use a discreet video solution as opposed to the 6150 GPU. With the ATI card in place, the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS slightly trails the ASUS A8N-VM by one point, but is two points faster using the 6150.

Sysmark Internet Content Creation 2004

As before, slightly better performance with the discreet graphics.

PiFast

The Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS is a little faster in math than the ASUS A8N-VM in both discreet video and onboard setups.

TMPGEnc

ASUS continues to trail slightly against Foxconn in DVD encoding.

CDeX

Both systems are dead even here.

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