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.

PiFast hits both the CPU and memory pretty hard with this test, and the NVIDIA nForce 3 250Gb has a strong showing here. Close to four seconds separate the 3500+ and 3200+, with the overclocked 3500+ almost reaching a 41 second computing time.

CDex Audio Conversion Wav to MP3

CDex was used to convert a 414MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3.

The overclocked setup nets us the best time we've seen with MP3 conversion.

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.

Not much has changed here, as the K8N Neo2 armed with a 3500+ is almost a half minute faster in MPEG encoding.

Unreal Tournament 2003: Antalus, Min Detail @ 640

Quake 3: Arena, Min Detail @ 640

Gaming is no problem here, and like the application tests, we see that nothing was crippled with the revised K8N Neo2 as the performance scales as we expected.

Subsystem Testing - Audio

For our UT2003 audio/framerate tests, we ran dm-Antalus benchmarks at 640x480, minimum detail with sound on and off. This was repeated at 1024x768, but with maximum detail. The reasoning is at low detail and resolution, the work will fall on the CPU and motherboard subsystem. Higher resolution is more representative of actual gameplay for most users

With minimum detail and low resolution, the onboard sound results in over 40fps loss in performance. At a higher resolution and detail levels, the onboard sound's CPU utilization will not be a factor at all. There is less than 0.05fps loss in speed when using the onboard sound at this resolution, therefore, I wouldn't hesitate in using the onboard sound for general use and gaming.

In terms of sound quality, I found gaming to be very acceptable, as was the case with movie and MP3 playback. Even when doing some disk intensive tasks, MP3 playback was not affected.

For recording tests, I used a small microphone that came with my Audigy Platinum, and recorded a few sentences. Recording quality was acceptable for personal use, but I certainly wouldn't use the onboard solution for professional use.

Hard Drive Performance

We used HD Tach to gauge read performance with our Maxtor 120GB SATA drive. The disk was freshly imaged, and configured with only one partition.

The hard drive and controller maintained an even delta, without any spikes in performance. The drive's burst speed was about 117MB/sec, with a 48.6MB/sec average read, and about 2% CPU utilization.

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