Intel P965: MSI P965 Platinum and ECS PX1 Extreme
by Gary Key on December 6, 2006 4:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Media Encoding Performance
Our first test is quite easy: we take our original Office Space DVD and use AnyDVD Ripper to copy the full DVD to the hard drive without compression, thus providing an almost exact duplicate of the DVD. We then fire up Nero Recode 2, select our Office Space copy on the hard drive, and perform a shrink operation to allow the entire movie along with extras to fit on a single 4.5GB DVD disc. We left all options on their defaults except we checked off the advanced analysis option. The scores reported include the full encoding process and are represented in minutes and seconds, with lower numbers providing better performance.
The MSI P965 ties the Gigabyte and ASUS boards in this very demanding test while the ECS board once again trails the pack due to its memory performance issues. The 975X and NVIDIA 570SLI lag slightly behind in this test where the CPU and storage subsystems are stressed.
Audio Encoding Performance
While the media encoding prowess of the P965 boards was superb in our initial media encoding testing, we wanted to see how they faired on the audio side. Our audio test suite consists of Exact Audio Copy v095.b4 and LAME 3.98a3. We utilize the INXS Greatest Hits CD that contains 16 tracks totaling 606MB of one time '80s hits.
We set up EAC for variable bit rate encoding, burst mode for extraction, use external program for compression, and to start the external compressor upon extraction (EAC will read the next track while LAME is working on the previous track, thus removing a potential bottleneck with the optical drive). We also set the number of active threads to two to ensure both cores are active during testing. The results are presented in minutes/seconds for the encoding process, with lower numbers being better.
As in the media encoding section, the more intensive CPU and storage system tests seem to favor the P965 over the i975X/NV570SLI when running at the same memory timings. Once again, the MSI P965 Platinum shows surprising strength at stock speeds by finishing in a first place tie with our other top boards. We are tired of repeating this but our ECS board finishes near last due to memory timings, but its results are still acceptable.
File Compression Performance
In order to save space on our hard drives and ensure we had another CPU crunching utility, we will be reporting our file compression results with the latest version of WinRAR that fully supports multi-treaded operations and should be of particular interest for those users with dual core or multi-processor systems. Our series of file compression tests utilizes WinRAR 3.61 to compress our test folder that contains 444 files, ten subfolders, and 602MB worth of data. All default settings are utilized in WinRAR along with our hard drive being defragmented before each test.
Once again the MSI board shares first place honors. The margins are extremely close between our P965 boards just reiterating the fact that boards based on the same chipset are going to offer the same performance, even with the ECS having reduced memory performance. The 975X and 570SLI boards trail slightly but the differences are minimal.
Our first test is quite easy: we take our original Office Space DVD and use AnyDVD Ripper to copy the full DVD to the hard drive without compression, thus providing an almost exact duplicate of the DVD. We then fire up Nero Recode 2, select our Office Space copy on the hard drive, and perform a shrink operation to allow the entire movie along with extras to fit on a single 4.5GB DVD disc. We left all options on their defaults except we checked off the advanced analysis option. The scores reported include the full encoding process and are represented in minutes and seconds, with lower numbers providing better performance.
The MSI P965 ties the Gigabyte and ASUS boards in this very demanding test while the ECS board once again trails the pack due to its memory performance issues. The 975X and NVIDIA 570SLI lag slightly behind in this test where the CPU and storage subsystems are stressed.
Audio Encoding Performance
While the media encoding prowess of the P965 boards was superb in our initial media encoding testing, we wanted to see how they faired on the audio side. Our audio test suite consists of Exact Audio Copy v095.b4 and LAME 3.98a3. We utilize the INXS Greatest Hits CD that contains 16 tracks totaling 606MB of one time '80s hits.
We set up EAC for variable bit rate encoding, burst mode for extraction, use external program for compression, and to start the external compressor upon extraction (EAC will read the next track while LAME is working on the previous track, thus removing a potential bottleneck with the optical drive). We also set the number of active threads to two to ensure both cores are active during testing. The results are presented in minutes/seconds for the encoding process, with lower numbers being better.
As in the media encoding section, the more intensive CPU and storage system tests seem to favor the P965 over the i975X/NV570SLI when running at the same memory timings. Once again, the MSI P965 Platinum shows surprising strength at stock speeds by finishing in a first place tie with our other top boards. We are tired of repeating this but our ECS board finishes near last due to memory timings, but its results are still acceptable.
File Compression Performance
In order to save space on our hard drives and ensure we had another CPU crunching utility, we will be reporting our file compression results with the latest version of WinRAR that fully supports multi-treaded operations and should be of particular interest for those users with dual core or multi-processor systems. Our series of file compression tests utilizes WinRAR 3.61 to compress our test folder that contains 444 files, ten subfolders, and 602MB worth of data. All default settings are utilized in WinRAR along with our hard drive being defragmented before each test.
Once again the MSI board shares first place honors. The margins are extremely close between our P965 boards just reiterating the fact that boards based on the same chipset are going to offer the same performance, even with the ECS having reduced memory performance. The 975X and 570SLI boards trail slightly but the differences are minimal.
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mostlyprudent - Wednesday, December 6, 2006 - link
I had been looking forward to the review of the MSI board. I can understand some OC limitation at the price, but then don't call it a "Platinum" board. I really don't do very much OCing, but always view the ability to reach high overclocks as a sign of a more well engineered board.Anyway, thanks for the review.
Beachspree - Monday, December 11, 2006 - link
I was wondering why the Firewire performance is so poor in these reviews:Firewire 400 gets a best throughput of 230.6Mb/s
It is known that Macs have poor USB 2 performance but look at the Firewire results by Barefeats:
http://www.barefeats.com/usb2.html">http://www.barefeats.com/usb2.html
http://www.barefeats.com/hard70.html">http://www.barefeats.com/hard70.html
Without the perfect conditions of a RAM disk and no cacheing they get real world performance of up to:
Firewire 400: 304 Mb/s (31% faster)
Firewire 800: 464 Mb/s (41% faster)
For comparison, Macs are getting lousy USB 2 performance. Intel Macs have improved it but that takes it from around 136Mb/s to 168Mb/s. That's 75% slower.
Given the importance of Firewire in critical multimedia applications and it's likely use for HD video camcorders does this poor performance not warrant a mention?
Beachspree - Monday, December 11, 2006 - link
To be clearer:Can we please have some real world figures for USB 2.0, eSATA and Firewire 400/800 transfers?
That should take the form of transfers of:
a) Many small files
b) One large file
under default settings and off an internal 7200 HDD you standardize on. That's what most people actually do when the backup, so that's what we need to see in order to make informed choices. I suspect these data rates you keep publishing are ones we will actually never see.
I suggest, also, that poor Firewire performance in Windows is more important than poor USB on Macs. They always have Firewire built in and tend to it on peripherals, while Windows users often make do with USB until they get into music or video editing when they then find the need for Firewire and hit this poor performance just when they start needing mission critical performance. I'm talking about dropped frames and music latency.
Why is that ignored in all your motherboard reviews?
Thanks.