Epox 5LWA+ i925XE Motherboard
PCMark04 Comparisons
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For our next set of benchmarks, we ran the CPU and Memory performance modules built-into Futuremark's PCMark04. For those interested in more than just the graphs, we've got a couple of quotes from Futuremark that explain exactly what these tests do and how they work...
"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. There are nine tests in all. Two pairs of tests are run multithreaded - each test in the pair is run in its own thread. The remaining five tests are run single threaded. These tests include such functions as file encryption, decryption, compression and decompression, grammar check, audio conversion, WMV and DivX video compression."
For the most part, this review of the Epox 5LWA+ is the opposite side of our previous look at the Shuttle SB95P. Both are based on the i925XE chipset, and very little separated the two boards in our suite of benchmarks. To liven things up a bit, we've thrown in the results from our previous test bed consisting of a stock Intel D915PBL motherboard also paired with the same CPU and RAM. As seen above, the Epox 5LWA+ was the best of the bunch, albeit by relatively slim margins.
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"TheMemory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing."
As far as the memory testing went, the Shuttle SB95P turned the tables on the 5LWA+. It just managed to squeeze by, scoring 22 points higher, although we can still basically call this one a draw. More pertinent to point of our review is that they are both ahead of the i915P based Intel board by just shy of two percent. That extra bit of bandwidth can make all of the difference in some of our more memory intensive benchmarks down the road.
