With this game there is really no difference between the two different systems.  Either as a CPU test or a audio test both boards perform almost exactly the same as the other.  Overclocking does make a difference, as there is a 17% increase in average frame rate, which offsets the loss produced by enabling the sound in this game.  What about if we move to a better looking resolution and quality setting?

    The same results as the previous test, with the overclocked system providing the same frame rate with sound enabled that the stock speed results give with sound disabled.  The advantage given by overclocking is again 15%.  So we have seen that the sound card on the ECS motherboard seems to be at least the same if not better than the Albatrons' sound card.  We have also seen that the two motherboards are basically identical when comparing their respective performances together, but that overclocking gives a 1:1 increase in average frame rate.  So lets take a look at some video encoding tests.

    XMPEG is one of the first steps in taking the raw DVD files and converting them into something a little smaller.  So lets see how it handles our test VOB file, without sound being involved at all.

    We can see that these two motherboards perform the same here, within 0.5% of each other at stock speeds.  Overclocking again improves things, by 20% in this case.  This is a very nice increase from a 15% increase in clock speeds, which shows its both CPU and FSB limited here.  In all three test systems the CPU usage was about 70% of both CPU's, or 140% of standard single core/non-hyperthreaded CPU usage.  Now lets look at converting an HuffYUV AVI to DiVX AVI.

    Identical results are obtained by both motherboards, with the results being within a 0.03 seconds of each other.  Overclocking again gives us a good increase in encoding speed, another 16% increase is nothing to laugh at, especially since this moves it to the 30+fps average which means it is extremely close to real time encoding here.  CPU usage of all tests was 50% as this program is not able to make use of more than one logical/physical core.  Now lets move on to the last video encoding test, that of AVI to Mpeg 2 video with TMPGEnc.

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