CrossFire Xpress 1600 Motherboards: DFI, Asus, ECS

Name: CrossFire Xpress 1600 Motherboards: DFI, Asus, ECS - Page 13
Brand: CrossFire

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, May 04, 2006, 01:30 AM EDT

We continued testing these CrossFire Xpress 1600 based motherboards with a few more tests that are part of the Worldbench 5.0 suite. Up next we have some performance results of WB 5.0's 3Ds Max (Direct 3D) test. A number of different 3D objects are rendered and animated in this test, and the entire time to needed to complete the tasks is recorded. As is the case with all of the individual Worldbench tests, a lower score here indicated better performance.

PC World's World Bench 5.0: 3ds Max

More Real-World Application Performance

The nForce 4 based A8N32-SLI took a slight lead over the CrossFire Xpress based boards in Worldbench 5.0's 3DStudio Max benchmark, with the Intel system lagging behind by about 30 seconds. The DFI RDX200 CF-DR was technically the fastest of the CrossFire Xpress boards, followed by the ECS KA1 MVP and then Asus' A8R-MVP.

Windows Media Encoder 9

Digital Video Encoding

For our next text, we moved onto a benchmark based on Windows Media Encoder 9. PC WorldBench 5's Windows Media Encoding test reports encoding times in seconds, and like the tests above and on the previous page, lower times indicate better performance.

If we disregard the Intel results here, we clearly see that all of the other systems were very evenly matched. Encoding video is almost completely CPU and memory bandwidth dependant. And when you use the exact same Athlon 64 CPU and RAM in different systems, you'll likely get similar performance. That is, if all else is functioning properly in the system.

Tags: Asus, ECS, Fire, Motherboard, CrossFire, motherboards, SSF, Pre, DS, XP, OS, board, OSS, CrossFire X, AR

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com