Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P Ultra Durable 3 Motherboard
3DMark06 and LAME MT MP3 Encoding
3DMark06's built-in CPU test is a multi-threaded DirectX gaming metric that's useful for comparing relative performance between similarly equipped systems. This test consists of two different 3D scenes that are processed with a software renderer that is dependent on the host CPU's performance. Calculations that are normally reserved for your 3D accelerator are instead sent to the CPU for processing and rendering. The frame-rate generated in each test is used to determine the final score.
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CPU performance was spot-on in the 3DMark06 benchmark with each motherboard hovering right around 2100 Marks. Although the EP45-UD3P is towards the higher end of our list of boards, the entire margin of difference is 9 Marks, less than a single percent from the highest to the lowest performer.
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LAME MT is an open-source mid to high bit-rate and VBR (variable bit rate) MP3 audio encoder that is used widely around the world in a multitude of third party applications. In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file and converted it to the MP3 format using this multi-thread capable application in single and multi-thread modes. Processing times are recorded below, listed in seconds. Here, shorter times equate to better performance.
There's little to be gleaned from the LAME MT Encoding results. Whether using a single threaded pass or a multi-threaded one, the times from start to finish almost always turned out to be exactly the same, with two of the ASUS boards off by a second during one of the runs.
