Gigabyte's GA-8S648FX Motherboard

To get another look at the CPU and Memory performance, we turned to PCMark 2002. This benchmark from FutureMark performs a series of CPU tasks such as image compression, text searches, and audio conversion to give us three scores: CPU, Memory, and Hard Disk Drive (HDD).   Although it is a relatively quick test to perform, it is perfect for comparing the performance of two or more systems.  We ran PCMark2002's "CPU" and "Memory" performance modules on all of the test systems, with the CPU clocked at its default speed of 2.40GHz. 

The CPU performance module had the the Abit IS7-G at the top, with the Gigabyte GA-8S648FX at the bottom, but the margin of difference was a mere 83 points, a delta of about 1%, well within the margin of error for such a test.  At the very least, we can see that the CPU is operating within normal operating limits on the Springdale and SiS648FX boards.

Memory Test Technical details: (Quote Taken From Futuremark)

Raw read, write, and read-modify-write operations are performed starting from a 3072 kilobytes array decreasing in size to 1536 KB, 384 KB, 48 KB and finally 6 KB. Each size of block is tested two second and the amount of accessed data is given as result. In the STL container test a list of 116 byte elements is constructed and sorted by an integer pseudo-random key. The list is then iterated through as many times as possible for 2 seconds and the total size of the accessed elements is given as result. There are 6 runs of this test, with 24576 items in the largest run corresponding to a total data amount of 1536 KB, decreasing in size to 12288 items (768 KB), 6144 items (384 KB), 1536 items (96 KB), 768 items (48 KB) and 96 items in the smallest run corresponding to 6 KB of total data.

To find out how the boards relate in "Real World" performance, we used eTesting Labs' Business and Content Creation Winstone 2002 benchmarks.  We'll directly quote ZD's eTestingLabs website for an explanation as to how Business Winstone 2002 derives its score. (Content Creation Winstone 2002 uses the same process, but the scripted activities are comprised of different, more bandwidth hungry applications.):

"Business Winstone is a system-level, application-based benchmark that measures a PC's overall performance when running today's top-selling Windows-based 32-bit applications on Windows 98, Windows 2000 (SP2 or later), Windows Me, or Windows XP. Business Winstone doesn't mimic what these packages do; it runs real applications through a series of scripted activities and uses the time a PC takes to complete those activities to produce its performance scores."

Gaming benchmarks and the conclusion