Shuttle's SB81P XPC

We continued our testing with another application from Futuremark, 3DMark03, and with a video encoding benchmark using, Windows Media Encoder 9.  In the WME 9 test, we took a 416MB video file and encoded it into WMV9 format.  Times were recorded in Minutes : Seconds, with lower times indicating better performance.

Windows Media Encoder 9 More Digital Video Encoding

The memory bandwidth advantage that the AA8 DuraMAX enjoyed in the PCMark04 test seemed to give the Abit board a marginal edge in the WME 9 encoding tests.  Here, the AA8 DuraMAX finished the operation about 7 seconds faster than the SB81P, which in turn outpaced the i875 based system by 2 seconds.

3DMark03 DirectX Gaming Performance - Sort Of

It's not an actual game, but 3DMark03's built-in CPU test is a "gaming related" DirectX metric that's useful for comparing relative performance among similarly equipped systems.  This test consists of two different 3D scenes that are generated with a software renderer, which is dependant on the host CPU's performance.  This means that the calculations normally reserved for your 3D accelerator, are instead sent to the central processor.  The number of frames generated per second in each test are used to determine the final score.

3DMark03's built-in CPU benchmark put the Shuttle SB81P XPC ahead of the i875 based test system, but slightly behind the Abit AA8.  Once again though, the performance delta that separated the first and last place finishers in this test was quite small.  There was only a 2.1% performance difference separating the SB81P and the Abit AA8 DuraMAX, and a 4.4% difference separating the i875 from the AA8.