Benchmarks I
We'll start of with Sisoft Sandra's memory benchmark, one that highlights streaming data performance.
We can explain why the I845E-powered motherboard is lagging here quite easily. Intel didn't see the benefit of specifying their newest DDR chipset with PC2700 support at 100FSB, it retains the ability to only use PC2100 RAM. The other two motherboards directly support PC2700 (naturally faster) memory, and therefore surge ahead in this synthetic benchmark.
How do they fare in Pifast, a simple program that relies on bandwidth to calculate the constant Pi to X amount of places. I've set it to calculate 10 million decimal places by the fastest method possible.
Pretty much what I expected. Bandwidth reigns supreme here and the motherboard most able to supply it will naturally have an advantage. Just over 2 minutes are required, at 1600MHz, to calculate 10 million decimal places.
Next we'll turn our attention to MP3 encoding. We're benchmarking by encoding a 481MB custom WAV file into 128kb/s MP3 using the LAME 3.91 encoder and Razor-Lame front-end.
LAME encoding is an activity that is almost entirely CPU-bound, competing memory subsystems usually show little variance in results, this is the case here. It serves to ratify results. We expect the results to be the same and they are. Pure MHz is the key to this benchmark as it is largely unaffected by platform used.