AMD 785G Chipset Launch: ASUS and Gigabyte

To assess the performance of the 785G chipset, we put the boards featured earlier through a gauntlet of benchmarks. Starting with some preliminary testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA benchmark suite, we then move to PC Mark Vantage followed by 3D rendering tests with Cinebench and Kribibench, and finally mp3 encoding with LAME MT. We also test the 785G's Radeon 4200 IGP with a number multimedia apps as well as games.

For these tests the 785G was represented by the ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO and the Gigabyte MA785GMT-UD2H. They were both equipped with an AMD Phenom II X3 720 processor and DDR3. For reference, we pitted them against Intel's G41 chipset and NVIDIA's GeForce 9300, both equipped with the Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 processor.

HotHardware's Test Systems Covering the bases

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2009  Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2009 suite (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia and Memory Bandwidth).  All of the scores reported below were taken with the hardware running at default speeds and settings. 

The Gigabyte MA785GMT-UD2H performed very slightly better than the ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO in SANDRA's CPU Arithmetic test. These results are the average of 3 runs, so the difference is a bit more than a simple one-time fluke, but still too small to make any real difference.

The SANDRA CPU multimedia performance test tells a similar story as the CPU Arithmetic test. Once again the two boards are deadlocked. This is as expected since they implement the exact same chipset.

Again, as with the previous two tests, the results of the SANDRA Memory Bandwidth tests shows the two boards perform essentially the same, as expected.

Overall, all of the various SANDRA CPU benchmarks we ran reported scores in line with expectations. While this first round of benchmarks with SANDRA hasn't been especially illuminating, it does confirm that neither board has any glaring deficiencies. In the rest of the benchmarks, we expand our scope and put the two 785G boards up against some real competition.