Test software will be:

SiSoft Sandra 2004 - 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.

Sysmark 2004 - 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.

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.

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.

Unreal Tournament 2004 & Quake III Arena - run at 640x480 with minimal detail to test CPU/Subsystem performance.

SiSoft Sandra CPU

Multimedia

Memory

While a synthetic benchmark is no substitute for real world testing, the results from Sandra shown here do make for a good baseline comparison between the older 925XE board and the 955X. Of note is the fact that the Albatron 925XE put in some higher than average memory results while testing, and the 955X still came out slightly on top.

Sysmark 2004

Sysmark 2004 results are again just slightly higher than with the Albatron 925XE board, and while at first glance the difference is marginal, with Sysmark 2004 a large change in the results is significant. I can't say that I've noticed any huge changes between the two in office productivity outside of Sysmark however.

PiFast

Since PiFast makes good use of the CPU and the motherboard, I wasn't expecting any change between the two boards at all and that is precisely what happened.

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