Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 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.


Once again, the increased CPU and memory frequencies have shown their effect by slicing 32% from SuperPi’s calculation times. On a side note, we used HyperPI to run SPi Mod v1.5, since it has a better interface to deal with some Vista-related issues.


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.


Since PCMark Vantage tests all major sub-systems the performance gains are diluted when compared to previous programs, however a 20% improvement in overall synthetic system performance is very respectable.


Cinebench R10

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.


Once again, we remain amazed at how efficient Cinebench is, as the results have scaled perfectly with the increase in core speed.


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.


Video conversion is still one of the longest tasks that your average user undertakes, so it’s great to see that we were able to say approximately 8 minutes on a 40 minute task


Lame Front End

Unlike 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 Santana’s Supernatural album and converting it to MP3 using the VBR 0 quality preset.


And once again the overclocked configuration impresses by shaving 37 seconds off a roughly 3 minute task. It really amazing how fast we can rip and convert an entire CD album to high-quality MP3’s nowadays.


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.


With the overclocked settings, we were able to complete the benchmark a full 20 seconds faster than with the stock configuration, which is a respectable 28% improvement.


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.


If you are anything like us, WinRAR is an application that you use countless times per day, so any performance improvement can provide some very tangible time savings. With the overclocked settings, archive extraction was an impressive 38% faster than with the stock configuration, which is much greater than our 26% CPU overclock. This is because WinRAR extraction is heavily dependent on the memory sub-system, so our 50% memory overclock really comes into play.