Test Setup
MSI K8N Neo Platinum: Athlon 64 3200+ (10x200: 2GHz), 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC4000 Pro, AIW Radeon 9600 XT, 120GB Seagate SATA 7200rpm, Windows XP SP1, NVIDIA ForceWare 4.24, ATI Catalyst 4.5
ABIT KV8-MAX3: Athlon 64 3200+ (10x200: 2GHz), 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC4000 Pro, AIW Radeon 9600 XT, 120GB Seagate SATA 7200rpm, Windows XP SP1, VIA Hyperion 4in1 drivers 4.51, ATI Catalyst 4.5
Test software will be:
Business Winstone 2004
Content Creation 2004
Unreal Tournament 2003
Quake 3: Arena
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
The comparison motherboard will be the ABIT KV8-MAX3, running an Athlon 64 at 10x200. Cooling for both A64 motherboards was provided by the Koolance EXOS. The Corsair modules will be run at PC3200 with 2.5-3-3-5 memory timings.
All our benchmarks were run on a 32-bit version of Windows XP. The 64-bit Windows still isn't ready for prime time, and we chose not to use the beta version for our tests as it may not be a true indication of the motherboard's performance. According to AMD, we may get a significant performance boost in a true 64-bit environment. In anycase, the Athlon 64 (A64) runs 32-bit code natively with no emulation.
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. We do have a 64-bit copy, but unfortunently it won't work on our current version of Windows.
CPU Arithmetic Benchmark
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Whetstone FPU
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Dhrystone ALU
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| MSI K8N Neo |
8683
|
3171
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| ABIT KV8-MAX3 |
8576
|
3145
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CPU Multimedia Benchmark
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Integer aEMMX/aSSE
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Floating-Point iSSE2
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| MSI K8N Neo |
18797
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20573
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| ABIT KV8-MAX3 |
15397
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20278
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Memory Benchmark
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Int Buffered iSSE2
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Float Buffered iSSE2
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| MSI K8N Neo |
3057
|
3055
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| ABIT KV8-MAX3 |
3068
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3072
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With the exception of the memory benchmark, we can see that the K8N Neo edges the KV8-MAX3 by about 1% in the Whetstone FPU, but the gap widens to 18% in the Integer aMMX test.
ZD Business Winstone 2004
The ZD Winstone suite is a script that runs a series of actions and calculates a final score that measures a PC's overall performance.
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Score
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| MSI K8N Neo |
25.4
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| ABIT KV8-MAX3 |
24.5
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ZD Content Creation 2004
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Score
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| MSI K8N Neo |
31.2
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| ABIT KV8-MAX3 |
30.4
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In both the Business and Content Creation benchmarks, the K8N Neo Platinum holds a slight lead against the ABIT board. Having run these synthetic benchmarks, we now have an idea of some trends, but the true test is to see how they perform with real-world applications.
PiFast
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.
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Time in Seconds (lower is better)
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| MSI K8N Neo |
47.47
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| ABIT KV8-MAX3 |
47.86
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PiFast hits both the CPU and memory pretty hard with this test, and the NVIDIA nForce 3 250Gb has a strong showing here, edging out the K8T800 by 0.39 seconds. The difference may not seem like much, but if you take into account larger numbers, this gap will widen.
CDex Audio Conversion Wav to MP3
CDex was used to convert a 414MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3.
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Time in Minutes:Seconds (lower is better)
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| MSI K8N Neo |
1:33
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| ABIT KV8-MAX3 |
1:35
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As with the PiFast benchmark, the K8N Neo leads the KV8 again. This time, there is a wider gap in performance, with a difference of two seconds in MSI's favour.
TMPGEnc 2.521
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.
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Time in Minutes:Seconds (lower is better)
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| MSI K8N Neo |
3:54
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| ABIT KV8-MAX3 |
3:59
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Another victory here for the K8N, with five seconds separating the two boards.
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