Abit IC7G and Asus P4C800 Canterwood Mobotherboards

Applications used in the Business Winstone tests include:

• Five Microsoft Office 2002 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Word)

• Microsoft Project 2000

• Lotus Notes

• WinZip 8.0

• Norton AntiVirus

• Netscape Communicator

Applications used in the Content Creation Winstone tests include:

• Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1

• Adobe Premiere 6.0

• Macromedia Director 8.5

• Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev 4

• Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055

• Netscape Navigator 6/6.01

• Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 5.0c (build 184)

Veritest's Winstone benchmarks are fairly hard disk performance sensitive and in the Business and Content Creation tests, we're looking at what one would call a virtual "photo finish".  We used a Seagate Barracuda V SATA drive for each of the tests and drove the HD interface from the ICH5 Southbridge of the Intel chipset on each of these boards.  We've covered specific performance levels of Promise SATA controllers, like the one used the Asus board, as well as the Silicon Image controller used on the Abit board, here at HotHardware, in the past.  To get an idea of Serial ATA and Serial ATA RAID performance with these new controllers, please head to our January 14th Seagate SATA HD article here, our March 20th Maxtor SATA HD article here, and our recent endeavors with Intel's ICH5, here.

Other than the small variances you see in the Winstone test scores, which were completely within the margin of error for these two tests, the results were a bit of a yawn.  None of the motherboards here stepped out in front of the pack, with any real  significant performance advantage.

It wasn't until we fired up something a little more taxing on system bandwidth, that we began to see the field spread out a bit.  In our XMPEG test, we convert our standard in-house "Gomer Pyle" video clip (a relic for sure), which is a 200MB MPEG file, into DivX format.  Here are the results.

The Abit IC7-G and Asus P4C800 clearly show an edge, at default speeds, over the conservatively built Intel board.  Specifically, the Asus P4C800 shows a slight edge here over the other two contenders, which is more than likely due to its aggressive memory and CPU timings, when set at default speeds.  Regardless, the performance lead between the Asus P4C800 and the Abit IC7-G, is certainly negligible enough, that it is completely imperceptible to the end user.

3DMark 2003 and PCMark 2002