Test Setup

Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs), ~2.6GHz
Memory: 2048MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT/GTO
Driver Version: 6.14.0010.9371

Comparison Motherboards: MSI NVIDIA 6150 based mPC C51V

CPUs:

Going up against the MSI K9AGM2-FIH will be the MSI mPC C51PV with the NVIDIA 6150. All setups will share similar peripheral components, with the only performance influencing difference being the motherboards.

Test Software is as follows:

- Our standard synthetic suite gets another upgrade. We like to use Sandra (System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) to collect some numbers as a base. The numbers collected are consistent and are easily comparable between systems during tests.

- A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is 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 v170b2 was used to convert a 440.5MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

- We used an Animatrix file, titled , 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.

DVD Shrink - We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to 70%. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

- Photoshop is perhaps the defacto standard when it comes to photo editing tools. Given that it is so popular, we incorporated DriverHeaven's latest test into our review process. Lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

- We run the full suite of tests offered by 3DMark06 at 640x480 and collect the total 3DMark score and CPU score.

Doom 3, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2004 @ 640x480, HQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. Higher scores are better.

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. In this case, there were some tweaks done for the memory for the K9AGM2, but nothing else was available for either board.

SiSoft Sandra XI CPU

SiSoft Sandra XI MMX

SiSoft Sandra XI Memory

Things are pretty close across the board. The GeForce 6150 holds a slight advantage over the AMD 690G but as we've stated in the past, synthetic benchmarks should be looked at as a guideline. Let's move towards real-world tests.

PiFast

Both boards complete the tests in under 39 seconds. The C51PV is less than half a second faster than the K9AGM2.

CDeX

The K9AGM2 scores its first win here with a six second advantage over the C51PV.

TMPGEnc

Like the CDeX test, the results are close, but not as close as one may think considering a larger file can make the difference more apparent.

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