MP3, KribiBench, Raytracing, HDTach
WAV-to-MP3 encoding now. U2's Pop album (607MB) is crunched into 192kb/s MP3 format. RazorLAME and LAME 3.92 is used.
We said GHz didn't matter. It does in computational tasks such as MP3 creation.
Raytracing puts almost the entire load on the CPU and memory subsystem, and it also calls for masses of FPU power, something that the Athlon 64 3200+ is rather good at. You can download it here and try it for yourself.
KribiBench is an easy-to-use benchmark from Adept Development. It's a software (read subsystem) renderer that's capable of rendering amazingly complex scenes. The benchmark can be downloaded from here and features models with 16.7 billion polygons.. The test is the rather easier JetShadow model with the realistic setting. The KV8 does as well as the benchmark allows, that is, it seems to favour Intel's tight SSE2 implementation.
A couple of Western Digital 36GB Raptor SATA drives were run in RAID0 with a 64kb stripe size. HDTach was used as an elementary disk analysis tool.
This first graph shows the disks attached to the VT8237 on-chip SATA controller. Burst speed and STR are both excellent. The alarming aspect is the high CPU utilisation rate.
A different kind of graph is exhibited by the same drives on the discrete Silicon Image controller. The average read and burst speeds are both lower. CPU utilisation is even higher. That concerns us a little.