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 | | Benchmarks With Winstones And 3D Studio Max | | Lots of performance datapoints here | | We ran into a bit of a benchmarking snafu with the IC7-MAX3, early on in our Winstone testing. It was no fault of the Abit board however. It seems the current revision of Content Creation Winstone 2003 needs an LPT port in order to function properly. Otherwise, the test will crash upon initializing the Newtek Lightwave test. Since the IC7-MAX3 has no LPT port and is "legacy free", we weren't able to run our normal CC Winstone 2003 test. Regardless, the Business Winstone 2002 benchmark doesn't suffer from this bug. Here are the applications that Biz Winstone 2002 utilizes in calculating its performance metrics. -
Lotus Notes® R5 -
Microsoft® FrontPage® 2002 SP-1 -
Microsoft® PowerPoint® 2002 SP-1 -
Microsoft® Excel 2002 SP-1 -
Microsoft® Access 2002 SP-1 -
Microsoft® Word 2002 SP-1 -
Microsoft® Project 2000 -
WinZip® 8.0 -
Norton AntiVirusTM from Symantec -
Netscape® 6.2.1 | The Abit IC7-MAX3 comes to a photo finish against the DFI reference board here, without its Game Accelerator option enabled. However, while set to CAS2 timings, with Game Accelerator on the F1 setting, the IC7-MAX3 grabs a smallish but noticeable 4% lead.
As a replacement for our Content Creation Winstone test, we decided to run a quick SPECapc test for 3D Studio Max 4.2. Here we can see the memory bandwidth advantage of the IC7-MAX3, take over slightly with or without Game Accelerator F1 enabled. In either case, the differential is negligible in typical end user scenarios. | | | PCMark 2002 | | Basic Desktop Functions Performance | | FutureMark's PCMark 2002 test utilizes common and more generic computation tasks, like JPEG and Zip compressions and text search. It has a synthetic "normalized" scoring system and arrives at a PCMark score, for various subsystem performance metrics. We ran the CPU and Memory performance modules. Another dead heat finish at default speed is shown here, with nearly 100 point gain for the IC7-MAX3 at its Game Accelerator F1 setting. The IC7-MAX3 shows its "special sauce" in the memory test, at its "F1" setting, posts nearly a 600 point advantage. Our DFI reference board was optimized at CAS 2, 2, 2, 5 timings as well and running flat out as fast as it could but just couldn't keep up.
3DMark 2003 and Quake 3 Arena
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