Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P P45 Motherboard Review

System Benchmarks

SuperPi Mod v1.5

When running the SuperPI 32MB benchmark, we are calculating Pi to 32 million digits and timing the process. Obviously more CPU power helps in this intense calculation, but the memory sub-system also plays an important role, as does the operating system.


The increased CPU, front side bus, and memory clocks really have an opportunity to shine in SuperPI, reducing the overall time by almost 5 minutes. That is huge in a benchmark in which many spend countless hours trying to reduce their score by mere tenths of a second.


PCMark Vantage

The latest iteration of the popular system benchmark is PCMark Vantage from the Futuremark crew. The PCMark series has always been a great way to either test specific areas of a system or to get a general over view of how your system is performing. For our results, we simply run the basic benchmark suite which involves a wide range of tests on all of the sub-systems of the computer.


Although the difference in scores may seem minimal when compared to the massive gains that we have previously shown, PCMark Vantage tends to lean more towards real world performance and seeing a 20% gain is very respectable.


Cinebench R10

Another benchmarking community favorite, Cinebench renders an intense 2D scene relying on pure processing power. This is arguably one of the the most efficient programs tested today at utilizing all available cores. We will be running both the single-threaded and multi-threaded benchmarks.


Cinebench is an effective way of testing pure processing power, and the results demonstrate almost perfect scaling with the increase in CPU clocks.

DivX Converter v6

Now that we have ran some of the more 'synthetic' benchmarks, it is time for a real-life VOB to DivX encoding task. We will take a 1.08GB VOB rip of the cult-classic movie Full Metal Jacket and convert it into DivX using the default multi-media setting of DivX converter v6. DivX fully utilizes both cores of the processor and will rely heavily on all aspects of the system for performance.


Even with the advent of multi-core processors, video conversion is still one of the most time consuming endeavour that PC users are face with. As a result, being able to shave almost 8 minutes off a 40 minute task is a very tangible improvement.

Lame Front End

Unlike the DivX Converter, Lame Front End is not multi-threaded and only utilizes a single core. While this will obviously limit performance, we should still recognize significant time savings going from the stock to the overclocked settings. We will be encoding a WAV rip of Santana’s Supernatural album and converting it to MP3 using the VBR 0 quality preset.


Our overclocked system is RIAA's worst nightmare, able to rip and convert an entire CD album to high-quality MP3s in under 2.5 minutes, which is almost 25% faster than the stock configuration.


Photoshop CS3

For the image editing portion of this review, we will use Photoshop CS3 in coordination with Driver Heaven’s Photoshop Benchmark V2, which is an excellent test of CPU power and memory bandwidth. This is a scripted benchmark that individually applies 12 different filters to a 60MB JPEG, and uses Photoshop’s built-in timing feature to provide a result at each test stage. Then it’s simply a matter of adding up the 12 results to reach a final figure.


A 24% -- 18 second improvement between stock and overclocked configurations is very respectable and should convince all image-editing enthusiasts to overclock their systems.


WinRAR

The last of our real-life tests will be with the highly popular WinRAR v3.71, which has a built-in benchmark that can measure both single-threaded and multi-threaded archive extraction performance.


Along with being the first application that we install on a fresh Windows installation, WinRAR is a tool that we use countless times per day, so any performance improvement can provide some very tangible time savings. With the overclocked configuration, archive extraction was an impressive 38% faster than at stock. This improvement is much greater than our 26% CPU overclock, and this is because WinRAR extraction is heavily dependent on the memory sub-system, so our 50% memory overclock plays a significant role.