In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to
the MP3 format, which is a popular scenario that many end users work
with on a day-to-day basis to provide portability and storage of their
digital audio content. LAME is an open-source MP3 audio encoder that is
used widely in a multitude of third party applications.
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| LAME MT |
| Audio Conversion and Encoding |
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In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file (a
hallucinogenically-induced Grateful Dead jam) and converted it to the
MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT application, in both
single and multi-thread modes. Processing times are recorded below,
listed in seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance.
What else can you say here except that each board delivered nearly identical scores?
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| SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark |
| JavaScript Performance Testing |
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Next up, we have some numbers from the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. According to the SunSpider website:
This benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM
or other browser APIs. It is designed to compare different versions of
the same browser, and different browsers to each other. Unlike many
widely available JavaScript benchmarks, this test is:
Real World - This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks,
and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with
JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the
future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a
tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code
decompression, and many more examples. There are a few microbenchmarkish
things, but they mostly represent real performance problems that
developers have encountered.
Balanced - This test is balanced between different
areas of the language and different types of code. It's not all math,
all string processing, or all timing simple loops. In addition to having
tests in many categories, the individual tests were balanced to take
similar amounts of time on currently shipping versions of popular
browsers.
Statistically Sound - One of the
challenges of benchmarking is knowing how much noise you have in your
measurements. This benchmark runs each test multiple times and
determines an error range (technically, a 95% confidence interval). In
addition, in comparison mode it tells you if you have enough data to
determine if the difference is statistically significant.
All of the systems were testing using the latest version of Internet Explorer 10, with default browser settings, on a clean installation of Windows 7 Home Premium x64.
Although again the scores are tightly clustered, it's the Gigabyte G1.Sniper 5 that turns in the best performance, by a hair. The slowest was the ASUS Maximus VI Formula, and overall the Gigabyte boards fared a bit better than the ASUS boards here.
