Test
Setup: Intel 530, 1 Gigabyte of Mushkin PC-2 5300 DDR2,
HIS X800 XL iTurbo, Western Digital 250 GB, 8 megs cache, 7200
RPM
The
onboard audio and network connections were used during the review
to give an accurate measure of the overall performance and capabilities
of the board. Regrettably, I do not have any SATA hard drives
to test the SATA performance of this motherboard.
Test
software will be:
SiSoft
Sandra 2004 - Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a
popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks.
We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds, using the
32-bit 2004 version.
PiFast
- 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
- CDex
was used to convert a 414MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are
in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.
Unreal
Tournament 2004 - run at 640x480 with minimal detail to test
CPU/Subsystem performance.
SiSoft
Sandra 2005
SiSoft
CPU
SiSoft
Multimedia
This
is one of those synthetic benchmarks, and a lot of people don't
like synthetic benchmarks because they don't show “real
world” performance. However, Sandra does provide a really
good baseline comparison between systems and components, and as
such, it is still a useful benchmark to use and include in reviews.
PiFast
Lower
times are better, as this is the total time it took to compute
the specified number of digits. I don't know about you,
but I think that 45.52 seconds is a pretty good time to compute
ten million digits of PI. In comparison to most other reviews
that use the P4, this is on par or slightly better. I wish that
I had another PCI-Express board that I could use to give a comparison,
however, this is not the case.
TMPGEnc
While
the file we use isn't a really large file, doing a complete
encoding of a video in 3 minutes and 14 seconds isn't too
bad. This obviously scales up with the size of the video, but
there are few computers currently available that would allow you
to do video encoding and use the machine at the same time, so
it isn't like you will be sitting there watching the progress
bar move across the screen while you video encodes. All things
considered, I believe that this time is fairly consistant with
other similar systems, so once again, the Foxconn 925XE is right
up there with everything else.
NEXT
