EPoX 4PDA5+ Review - Performance Testing

Here' are the programs used in the testing:

• ScienceMark 2
• WinRAR
• CDex and the LAME Encoder
• AquaMark 3
• 3DMark 2001SE
• OpenSSL

I also had these pieces of hardware constant for the motherboard comparison:

• Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz 'C' processor
• 1 GB Infineon RAM
• Maxtor 80 GB Hard drive
• ASUS Radeon 9600XT with 128 MB RAM and latest Omega drivers

I used these operating systems to evaluate the 4PDA5+:

• Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 1 and all extra updates
• Gentoo Linux 2004.0, kernels 2.4.26 and 2.6.4

The benchmarks will be comparing the 4PDA5+ against a Soltek 86SPE-L Springdale motherboard with an i865PE/ICH5 combination.

(Note: I had originally planned to use XMPEG and DivX 5.1.1, but the benchmark feature is extremely disk limited and caused jumps from 2 FPS of encoding to 40 and then back to 2 as thrashing kicked in.)

ScienceMark 2

ScienceMark 2 is a collection of benchmark tests based on scientific calculations with known results. It recently has integrated the STREAM memory test and a BLAS benchmark test for matrix multiplication.

Here we see the 4PDA5+ seriously overpower the Soltek in memory bandwidth, pulling in a theoretical 1 GB/s more than the Soltek. In the Cipher and Primordia tests, which are more CPU intensive, we also see the 4PDA5+ perform slightly better in the Cipher test, but within experimental error. In the Primordia test, the numbers are so close that it could go either way.

Next: More Tests >>
 

More Motherboards Articles
More By Quantum Skyline