Benchmarks I
Pifast, our first practical test, simply calculates the constant Pi to the desired number of decimal places. I've chosen 10 million using the fastest method possible. Memory bandwidth has historically played a major part in this benchmark.
Although it's the slowest of our quintet, the difference is negligible amongst the bottom three boards. The P4X400 steals a slight march. I'm sure its 40MHz extra clock-speed has something to do with it. PC1066 RAMBUS blazes a trail that no other chipset can keep up with.
Next we'll turn our attention to MP3 encoding. We're benchmarking by encoding a 600MB+ custom WAV file (U2's Pop album, incidentally) into 192kb/s MP3 using the LAME 3.92 encoder and Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end.
LAME encoding loves pure MHz. Four motherboards are tied at 195 seconds whilst the P4X400 consistently takes between 1 and 2 seconds. The explanation lies in its clock-speed advantage, probably.
Next is SETI. Working through a tough 0.417 work unit takes a while. If you're into SETI you'll know that each minute counts if you're running 24/7.
The results almost mirror the Pifast results. The times in hours, minutes, and seconds show that real bandwidth pays here. The SOYO is pretty good here.
Next is DVD-to-DivX encoding. DivX4.12 with a 2-pass encoding of Gone in 60 seconds with an 1800kb/s bit rate. An average is calculated when the first VOB is complete. The borders are cropped to save encoding time.
A steady pattern emerges with RAMBUS comfortably taking first place, the VIA P4X400 sneaking into second, and the remaining DDR motherboards fighting it out. The SOYO manages to tie the VIA motherboard even though its carrying a 40MHz clock-speed disadvantage.