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: AMD
AM2 5000+
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:
SiSoft
Sandra XI - 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.
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 v170b2 was used
to convert a 440.5MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times
are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.
TMPGEnc
4.0 XPress v4.2.1.188 - 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.
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
CS2 Driver Heaven Test - 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.
3DMark06
- 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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