Benchmarks II
DVD encoding is a favourite pastime of mine and many of our readers. Any increase in speed is most welcome as encoding is still a time consuming activity. We're encoding the Three Kings DVD in full-screen format (720x576), with black borders cropped. We're using XMPEG v4.20 and the DivX 5.0 CODEC, coupled with YUV2 spacing. Sound is not encoded. We take an average after 20,000 frames have been encoded.
Again, we see a close set of results at 100FSB, all within 1 FPS. Running a faster CPU, FSB, and memory pay dividends with a greatly increased encoding rate, once again the I845E-equipped IT7 displaces the EPoX I845D by the smallest of margins.
We next ran the OCUK SETI benchmark. The work unit sifts through data in the hope of finding some inkling of E.T existence, It takes a while to complete.
SETI loves nothing more than bandwidth, the platform best able to supply it naturally will do well. We see the I850 and SiS645 out in front when judged at 100FSB, the difference between them and the I845D / I845E chipsets is around 5%, the largest margin we've seen to date. The faster clock speed of 2.133GHz, coupled with faster memory, 177MHz, ably illustrate just how important speed is to SETI. The IT7 coming out on top once more.
We've been blessed with 8-channel onboard RAID courtesy of the HPT374 controller. In an attempt to compare the basic performance of the controller to the standard IDE motherboard port, I ran the HDTach read test to check for any anomalies in performance.. Firstly here a WD 1200JB drive on the system IDE port as primary master.
You can see that the graph is relatively smooth with a 40MB/s+ average sustained transfer rate across 111GB. Now here is the same drive as master one of the HPT374 ports.
We see that the graphs are pretty similar, the read burst rate is a shade lower on the HPT374 RAID ports but not significantly so. CPU utilisation is a shade higher, too. Still, the performance from both ports can be defined as analogous.
I also tested the drive on both ports whilst benchmarking PCMark 2002, the HPT374 port scored 1178 marks, whilst the standard IDE port scored 1140 marks in the disk benchmarks, again, very similar performance.
