Gigabyte GA-EP45T-Extreme Motherboard Review

System Benchmarks

When running the 32M benchmark of SPi, 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. SPi 32M has been a favorite amongst benchmarks for these very reasons and is admittedly the favorite benchmark of this reviewer.

We see the increased bandwidth really start to show its teeth when matched up with the higher FSB despite only a 150MHz CPU overclock. The SuperPi 32M time dropped over a minute with these minor changes and goes to show just how memory dependant this benchmark can be.

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.

The difference in PCMark Vantage score was a bit more than we were expecting but when you look at it, the system is substantially overclocked despite the CPU frequency remaining relatively the same. PCMark tends to lean more towards real world performance and seeing gains like this helps emphasize what a good kit of memory can do for a system.

Another benchmarking community favorite, Cinebench renders an intense 2D scene relying on all the processing power it can. Cinebench R10 is another 64-bit capable application and is likely the most efficient program tested today at utilizing all cores of a processor. We will be running both the single threaded and multi-threaded benches here today.

Cinebench R10 is solely a representation of CPU power and with a minor increase from 3GHz to 3.15GHz, we see only a minor increase in Cinebench numbers.

Moving from some of the more 'synthetic' benchmarks, we find ourselves smack dab in the middle of a VOB to DivX encoding task. We will take a VOB rip of the movie Before The Devil Knows Your Dead, and convert it into DivX using the default 720P setting of DivX converter v6. This is a real life test of a task that may be routinely seen these days.

DivX heavily relies on CPU Frequency for encoding but it is also clear from these results that memory and system clock frequency definitely help it out as well. Again, a 5% increase in CPU speed equates to an almost 9% increase in converting performance. More evidence that memory and system speed does account for a lot of the performance gains we are seeing here today. Without XMP memory, however, you really would have to know what you are doing in overclocking to get results like this.

Un-like the DivX conversion we just looked at, Lame Front End is not multi-threaded and only utilizes a single core of a processor. This will obviously limit performance but we should still recognize significant time savings going from the stock settings to the overclocked results. We will be encoding a WAV rip of the Blackalicious album, Blazing Arrow and converting it to MP3 using the VBR 0 quality preset.

Un-like the other real world applications thus far, Lame Front End seems oblivious to the system speed increase and barely registers a difference clocking in at just under a 5% decrease in converting time.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is full x64 compliant and ready and able to use every single CPU cycle our processor has available. Since digital photography is as popular as roller skates were in the 70's, we are going to be timing how long it takes to convert 100 RAW images from a Canon 20D into half size JPG files of maximum quality.

Photoshop CS3 picks up the slack of LFE when converting large RAW images from a digital SLR camera to web useable JPG images and nearly slices 23% on the time needed to do so. This is a combination of increased system and memory performance with the additional CPU frequency helping out as well.