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, MSI MSI K9AGM2-FIH

CPUs: AMD AM2 5000+

Going up against the MSI K9AG Neo2-Digital will be the mATX MSI K9AGM2-FIH as well as 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.

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. Both of the 690G boards are more or less at par. Let's move towards real-world tests.

PiFast

All of the boards complete the tests in under 39 seconds. The K9AGM2 holds a slight lead over the K9AG Neo2.

CDeX

Both K9AG boards tie, and lead the C51PV by 6 seconds.

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. The K9AGM2 is slightly quicker than the Neo2 version.

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