Common Hardware & Software Settings

Performance Test Suite

Even though each of these boards performance is extremely close to one another, this testing is definitely a must. Besides making sure each of these boards are optimized properly, these performance results also provide us with a good idea of the compatibility and stability these motherboards have to offer. Our benchmark test suite includes three passes of Sysmark98, which is run under both Windows 98 (SE) and Windows NT (SP5). The highest achieved score is used for the final result. Sysmark98 runs recorded scripts of 14 different popular business applications and provides us with an idea of performance in a typical office environment. Regarding gaming performance I included results from Quake 3 Arena Test, Shogo and Expendable Demo. Each game was run 5 times and then the highest score achieved was selected. Because the difference in performance is so slight, the numbers are merely just a reassurance that no manufacturer has fouled up their chipset performance settings. Since the benchmarks were run I have included the results for the performance freaks :).