MSI K9A2 Platinum AMD 790FX Motherboard
Test System and PCMark Vantage
How we configured our test systems: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for either DDR2-800 with 5,6,6,15 timings. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
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System 1: MSI K9A2 Platinum 2x1GB OCZ Gold XTC PC2 8800 Sapphire RX2600XT WD740 "Raptor" HD Windows Vista Ultimate |
System 2: Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5 CL 5-6-6-15 - DDR2-800 Sapphire RX2600XT WD740 "Raptor" HD Windows Vista Ultimate |
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For our first round of benchmarks, we ran all of the modules built into Futuremark's PCMark Vantage test suite. Vantage is a new benchmarking tool that we've incorporated into our arsenal of tests here at HotHardware. Here's how Futuremark positions their new benchmarking tool:
"The PCMark Suite is a collection of various single- and multi-threaded CPU, Graphics and HDD test sets with the focus on Windows Vista application tests. Tests have been selected to represent a subset of the individual Windows Vista Consumer scenarios. The PCMark Suite includes CPU, Graphics, Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and a subset of Consumer Suite tests."
The first specific test we'll cover is the PCMark Vantage "Memories" suite which is comprised of the following tests:
Memories 4 - Video Transcoding: media server archive to portable device
Vantage TV and Movies suite includes the following tests:
TV and Movies 3 - HDD Media Center
With Vantage's 'TV and Movies' test, the Gigabyte board managed a small lead over the K9A2 Platinum, topping it by 16 points, or 1.5% overall.