Benchmarks I
Given that the three comparison AMD motherboards are running at the same speed, give or take 0.1MHz, it will be interesting to see just how SiSoft SANDRA sees each board's unbuffered integer memory benchmark. Higher scores here have traditionally translated to higher performance in our real-world benchmarks.
The P4-based motherboard romps away in the benchmark, courtesy of its quad-pumped FSB. The 2 KT600 boards both run single-channel memory, so SANDRA asserts that they fall around 300MB/s shy of the dual-channel nForce2 Ultra 400. Remember that all boards are running the same RAM timings and FSB speeds.
Pifast, our resident Pi calculator to 10 million places, puts a great emphasis on getting information out to the CPU. The faster a board can accomplish this, the lower the overall time. All boards break the 70s barrier, but the nForce2 Ultra 400 still puts 4 seconds into the MSI KT600, which, in turn, takes 0.7s from the benchmarks laid down by the EPoX. Interesting.
An activity that relies primarily on pure CPU grunt is bound to produce similar results. That's kind of obvious from the above graph.
SETI, on the other hand, is more like Pifast. It loves low latency bandwidth and lots of it. The MSI puts in a creditable performance for a single-channel chipset.