Gigabyte GOPC CA2: Good Things Come in Small Packages - Benchmarking
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To see how well the GOPC lives up to its name, a bunch of benchmarks were thrown at it. Today's benchmark suite includes:
- 3DMark 2001SE
- PCMark 2004
- AquaMark3
- Unreal Tournament 2003
- WinRAR 3.30 Linux kernel decompress
- Super Pi
- LAME audio conversion
It will be compared it to:
- EPoX EP-4PDA5+ motherboard
- ASUS A9600XT/TVD Radeon 9600XT video card
- Windows XP Service Pack 1
and the same hard drive, processor, optical drive and memory as what was installed in the GOPC. To be fair to the DirectX 7 compliant video card on board in the GOPC, the graphics benchmarks were redone with the Radeon card in the GOPC.
NovaLogic's Comanche4 benchmark would have been part of the suite, but the onboard video card did not support hardware texture and lighting.
Having said that, let's get started:
AquaMark3
The first synthetic benchmark shows that the EPoX board has an overall edge on the GOPC, scoring 1000 extra points. The graphics test naturally killed the onboard video of the GOPC, especially in the 'Massive Overdraw' part, where the frame rate dropped to 1. The GOPC does win in the graphics part of the AquaMark3 score, consistently beating the EPoX.
3DMark 2001 SE
Echoing the results from the AquaMark3 test, we see the GOPC/Radeon 9600XT combination fall short of the EpoX motherboard. The on board SiS video card, unable to complete the Nature test, subsequently gets killed.
PCMark 2004
The less graphics idependent PCMark 04 displays a good show from the GOPC. The chipset shows the difference between the two scores using a Radeon 9600.
Unreal Tournament 2003
We get a snapshot of the GOPC's gaming performance here. It wins in the Antalus test with an extra video card, but the numbers are so close that they are within experimental error. The onboard video card completes the test, but this score and the rest show that this computer was not meant for gaming.
Super Pi
Super Pi was used to calculate one million digits of pi. In this test, where smaller is better, the GOPC falls behind, possibly due to the lack of dual channel support in the motherboard.
WinRAR 3.30
WinRAR 3.30 was used to uncompress the Linux 2.4.25 kernel source from tar/bzip2 format and then recompress it into a RAR file. The original archive is about 30 MB and uncompresses to roughly 150 MB of C source code.
This test is something that almost all computer users do - decompress and compress files into an archive. The GOPC seems to be consistently 20 seconds behind the EPoX.
LAME
The LAME encoder with the dBPowerAMP front end was used to encode already ripped WAV files of The Crystal Method's “'Legion of Boom' album into MP3 files using default settings.
Once again, the GOPC loses to the EPoX 4PDA5+, but not by much. The two computers are similar in raw computation tests.
Next: Linux Compatibility and Conclusion >>
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