µATX Part 2: Intel G33 Performance Review

Media Performance

We will take a brief look at general media performance with our test suite that includes Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0.

We utilize the PC WorldBench 6.0 Test for measuring platform performance in Adobe's Photoshop CS2. The benchmark applies an extensive number of filters to the test image and heavily stresses the CPU and storage systems. The scores reported include the full conversion process and is represented in seconds, with lower numbers providing better performance.


In a surprise, we see the Gigabyte G33 board topping our other two G33 boards - one of the few instances where this occurs. The G33 boards have up to an 18% advantage over the X1250 boards.

Our next test is one recommended by Intel, but the test itself appears to be fair and results are very repeatable. This test simply measures the amount of time required to fix and optimize 103 different photos weighing in at 63MB. Time is measured in seconds, with lower times resulting in better performance:


This test heavily stresses the CPU but also requires a quick storage system. Our ASUS P5K-VM tops the chart but only four seconds separates the group.

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-threaded 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 3.62 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 we see the G33 boards perform well in a test that stresses overall memory latencies and CPU/Memory throughput. The nature of file compression is such that memory is accessed almost constantly in a very random fashion, so page misses requiring additional time as memory banks are swapped are common. The ASUS board is 2% quicker than the Gigabyte board and up to 9% faster than the X1250 boards.

Rendering Performance

We are using the Cinebench 10 benchmark as it tends to heavily stress the CPU subsystem while performing graphics modeling and rendering. Cinebench 10 features two different benchmarks with one test utilizing a single core and the second test showcasing the power of multiple cores in rendering the benchmark image. We utilize the standard multiple core benchmark demo and default settings.


We see the MSI board leading the charts with the ASRock X1250 board nipping on the heels of the G33 boards. Even after a retest with the abit board, the results did not change.