Benchmarks II
DVD encoding is a favourite pastime of mine and many of our readers. Any increase in speed is most welcome as encoding is still a time-consuming activity. We're encoding the Three Kings DVD in full-screen format (720x576), with black borders cropped. We're using XMPEG v4.20 and the DivX 5.0 CODEC, coupled with YUV2 spacing. Sound is not encoded. We take an average after 20,000 frames have been encoded.
The MSI 645E Max-LRU takes top honours at 100FSB for the first time in our tests, albeit my the smallest margins possible. I'm also more than happy with the performance at 133FSB. It has a bandwidth deficit against the I845E but remains extremely close in real-world performance, it appears that the 645DX chipset is the beneficiary of memory optimations as well as 133FSB support. Again, the top two benchmarks are run at 2133 / 133MHz whilst the others are at 1600MHz / 100FSB.
Next up is the OcUK SETI benchmark, one with an Angle Ratio of 0.471, this one takes a while to complete.
The MSI 645E Max-LRU continues to trouble the previous standard-setter, the I850, in our benchmarks at default speed, it's simply the fastest DDR solution at stock speeds. At 133FSB, it still trails the I845E IT7, solely because the I845E has greater memory bandwidth on offer (177MHz Vs. 166MHz).
Top-of-the-line motherboards rarely ship without some sort of RAID support, ACARD ACHIP being the variant on offer here. We tested the striping potential by using two freshly formatted Western Digital 120GB JB drives. The HD graph below details the results we obtained when using a 64Kb stripe size.
I've previously seen a much smoother HD Tach graph when using a Promise RAID controller, so am rather disappointed with the result. The disappointment is amplified when you consider just how well a single drive performs on the same controller.
The results speak for themselves.