Test Setup

Gigabyte 8VT880P Combo: Intel P4 560, 2 x 1GB Corsair TWINX PC6400 Pro, MSI 6800GT, 160GB Seagate SATA 7200.7, Windows XP SP1

MSI 915P Neo2 Platinum: Intel P4 560, 2 x 1GB Corsair TWINX PC6400 Pro, MSI 6800GT, 160GB Seagate SATA 7200.7, Windows XP SP1

Test software will be:

- 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.

- 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.

- Sysmark 2004 is BAPCo's latest revision of the mainstream office productivity and Internet content creation benchmark used to characterize the performance of the business client. It uses a number of real-world applications and runs them through a series of tests. We tested with the office, and content creation benchmarks.

- 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.

- Bad Company - 10 from 9 was ripped into one 414MB .wav file. We then encoded that .wav file into a 320Kb/s sample rate MP3.

Unreal Tournament 2004, Doom 3, Far Cry- Modern day shooters which we're sure all our readers are familiar with. Benchmarks were done at 640x480 with minimal detail and sound disabled.

All benchmarks were run a total of three times, with the average results shown here today. We're comparing performance directly against the 915P since it's the only chipset we have that falls in a similar price-point.

SiSoft Sandra 2005 CPU

The ALU and iSSE2 benchmarks are in favour of the Gigabyte board by a small margin.

SiSoft Sandra 2005 MMX

Another close one here with the PT880 winning the Floating Point test and the 915P taking the Integer.

SiSoft Sandra 2005 Memory

Much closer than we anticipated. While the 915P does hold an edge here, the differences are marginal at best.

ZD Business Winstone 2004

Moving on to our real-world tests, things are beginning to get a bit bumpy for Gigabyte. The 915P holds a clear advantage over the PT880 Pro here.

Sysmark 2004 Office Productivity and Content Creation

Following the same trend as our Winstone tests, the Gigabyte 8VT880P Combo falls short again against the MSI 915P.

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