VirtualDub Audio Extraction

We ripped the audio of at 44 100Hz, no compression using VirtualDub 1.5.8 (Build 18068). Times are in seconds, and lower is better.

Lower times are better

The PT880 takes our sound extraction tests by one second. Score one here for VIA.

TMPGEnc 2.521

We used the same Animatrix file and the WAV created from VirtualDub, and converted it into a VCD compliant MPEG-1 file. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

Lower times are better

Another close one here, but the Canterwood takes the MPEG encoding test by four seconds.

Quake 3: Arena @ 640

Return to Castle Wolfenstein @ 640

In gaming, the PT880 seems well suited for whatever may be thrown at it. Performance is very close to the Canterwood, and it probably won't take too much for VIA to squeeze more out of the PT880.

Subsystem Testing - Sound Tests

In terms of sound quality, I found gaming to be very acceptable, as was the case with movie and MP3 playback. Music playback was very impressive, and with good quality speakers, the Envy controller sounds very good.

USB 2.0 Performance

We did the same file transfer tests as in the Mushkin Flashkin review, copying several small files from the hard drive to the flash drive.

One second is all that separates the two boards, but the PT880 takes this one.

SATA Performance

Testing was done using a freshly imaged disk, split into partitions of 40GB, 50GB, 30GB (roughly), and benched on a Seagate 120GB SATA drive using the VIA controller.

CPU utilization was quite low, averaging 2.2%. The average read speed was about 47500kps, peaking as high as 63484kps. These results were quite good, and some of the lowest CPU utilization scores we've seen.