MSI Big Bang XPower Review: X58, Military Style

Name: MSI Big Bang XPower Review: X58, Military Style - Page 7
Brand: MSI

by Joel Hruska — Monday, August 16, 2010, 12:00 PM EDT

LAME MT MP3 Encoding Test

Single and Multiple threaded Audio Encoding

In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format, which is a popular scenario that many end users work with on a day-to-day basis to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. LAME 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. We created our own 223MB WAV file and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT application in both single and multi-threaded modes. Processing times are recorded below, listed in seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance.

We don't often see much of a difference when it comes to encoding MP3s with LAME and we saw nothing here to change that. All three motherboards were within seconds of each other.

Futuremark PCMark Vantage

Simulated Application Performance

We then ran our motherboards through PCMark Vantage, Futuremark’s latest system performance metric built especially for Windows Vista and Windows 7. PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads, including High Definition TV and movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity. Most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, so they can exploit the additional resources offered by multi-core CPUs. We used the 64-bit version of the benchmark, with patch 1.02 installed.