Intel G965: microATX Performance Update

Media Encoding Performance

Our first series of tests is quite easy - we take our original Office Space DVD and use AnyDVD and Nero Recode 2 to copy the full DVD to the hard drive without compression, thus providing an almost exact duplicate of the DVD. We then fired up Nero Recode 2, selected our Office Space copy on the hard drive, and performed a shrink operation to allow the entire movie along with extras to fit on a single 4.5GB DVD disc. We then go back and use Nero Recode to shrink the full DVD copy and burn it onto our 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/seconds, with lower numbers indicating better performance.


We continue to see a strong performance from the P965 board in our application tests. Our only issue with the G965 board was that the conversion process would slow down at various intervals while the disk was being heavily accessed. The quality of the video conversion was never affected but it appeared under heavy CPU usage that disk performance or throughput suffered ever so slightly. Both boards utilize the same ICH8 Southbridge so our conclusion would be potential timing or tuning issues between the Northbridge and Southbridge as our disk access/throughput scores in HDTune and IPEAK were identical between the two boards. The end result is one of the larger (a whopping 2.1%!) performance differences - again not something you would typically detect.

Media Performance

We utilize the widely available Retouch Artists Photoshop Speed Test for measuring platform performance in Adobe's Photoshop CS3. The benchmark applies a number of actions to a test image and we measure the total time elapsed during the active portion of the test. We set history states to 1, cache levels to 4, and CS3 is configured to make use of all available system memory. The scores reported include the full conversion process and are represented in minutes/seconds, with lower numbers indicating better performance.


The results are once again interesting as we did not expect our G965 board to perform this well after the previous results. Photoshop has generally favored CPU and memory throughput speeds so our results indicate our Encoding and Multitasking scores show an issue with timing or tuning between the Northbridge and Southbridge. However, any differences in actual scores are minor and probably just indicate something additional BIOS tuning could fix.

Audio Encoding Performance

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.


Our Plextor drive consistently takes two minutes and nine seconds to read all sixteen tracks. This means our test systems are only utilizing one core during testing until the midway point of the extraction process where the drive speed begins exceeding the capability of the encoder and requires the use of a second thread.

As in the Photoshop test, the more intensive CPU tests seem to favor the G965 over our P965 board when running at the same basic memory timings. The differences are once again minimal showing that both systems are equal in our opinion.

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 3.62 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 in a CPU crunching test we see the G965 fair better than the P965. This test is slightly surprising as it tends to be fairly disk intensive. However, the read/write operations are very short in nature with burst speeds being important compared to the constant write activity in the media encoding tests. Where the media encoding favored the P965 by 2%, the reverse is true here and the G965 gets its largest margin of victory: a similarly "huge" 2.1% discrepancy. That's relatively close to the margin of error for these tests anyway, so we can declare performance to be more or less a tie between the two platforms.