Socket 939 Roundup: Battle at the Top
by Wesley Fink on July 30, 2004 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
General Performance and Encoding
We never expected the nVidia nForce3 Ultra to be a better performer in Winstone benchmarks than the VIA K8T800 PRO. However, both the nF3 Ultra boards are outperforming the VIA boards by a significant percentage. Since the nVidia 6800 Ultra video card was used for all benchmarking in the roundup, we plan to verify these results with an ATI X800 XT as soon as that board is available to the Motherboard Lab for testing.
The performance of the Socket 939 boards in the new AuotGK 2-pass Media Encoding benchmark was also a mild surprise. We expected Intel to retain their lead in media encoding due to our logical choice of DivX 5.1.1 as the encoding codec. This codec fully exploits some of the features of the Intel chipset, like SSE3, and generally favors the Intel processors. The DVD2AVI engine at the heart of AutoGK, on the other hand, generally favors AMD processors. It appears that you can really show whatever you wish in encoding these days depending on the Encoding program and codec used. Anand did extensive research on media encoding and chose the new AutoGK/DivX 5.1.1. as our new standard due to the fair, balanced and respected results obtained with this combination.
It certainly looks like the combination of Socket 939, FX53, and AutoGK/DivX 5.1.1 balances the field for media encoding. The difference between top systems from AMD and Intel is now less than 3% with Divx, which can be considered equivalent. A quick check using a 2-pass test with the Xvid codec shows the Intel 3.6 at 35.2 and the AMD FX53 at 35.8, again essentially a dead heat. The upcoming move to 64-bit encoding should significantly boost Athlon 64 performance, giving A64 a formidable lead in encoding benchmarks.
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RyanVM - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Also, networking benches would have been nice (throughput and CPU utilization). It would be interesting to see what kind of impact Gigabyte going with a 3rd party ethernet controller has in comparison to the MSI board using the NF3's controller.On a somewhat related note, when will the Neo2 actually be available for purchase?
Marlin1975 - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
How about telling board makers to use better Sound for their boards.I got my board as it came with a VIA Envy soundcard. When I see RealTek sound that tells me they don;t care about quality, but about what they can say comes with the board.
Even C-Media has a new full (non-ac97) soundchip out now that can;t be that much more then a realtek 850/650/655 chip.
Wesley Fink - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
#7,8,9 - Corrected. Since ECS did use a SiS chip on their VIA board for secondary RAID, I got confused and spread the chipsets around :-)Stefpet - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
...but when will we see K8T890 or nforce4 motherboards?I don't want to be forced to replace the motherboard with a new one to get that top performing PCI Express card later...
Crassus - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Final words, somewhere in the middle of the page:"The ECS is a remarkable step forward for ECS"
:c)
Great work, though.
RyanVM - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Silly me, I meant ECS, not Epox.RyanVM - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
"8 USB 2.0 ports supported by nF3-250" for the K8T800PRO-based Epox KV2?Wesley Fink - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
#4 - Corrected. With more than 9000 words a number typo seems inevitable.BLHealthy4life - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Still can't find the MSI K8n Neo2 mobo for sale anywhere.Been waiting and waiting....and waiting some more...
AkumaX - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Our FX53 topped out at about 2.59 GHz on the ECS KV2, which is slightly below the 3.6+ achieved on the top 939 boards