A Lackluster Premiere: ALi Aladdin-P4

Benchmarks Under Windows 2000

Because we wanted to avoid the automatic resource management feature integrated in Windows XP, we chose to use Windows 2000 to test this crop of chipsets. The only reason for picking Windows 2000 over Windows XP is that the newer version of Windows optimizes how background applications run. This new feature would have prevented us from obtaining accurate benchmarking results.

We performed a total of 17 different benchmark tests in order to obtain the most complete, well-balanced view of how each chipset performs. You can get a clear overall picture from the benchmark results for a total of 7 different platforms, all of which are intended for use with the Intel Pentium 4. We ran four different Quake 3 tests to determine OpenGL performance. The different MPEG-encoding benchmarks provide a comprehensive testing environment - the Lame MP3 Encoder was used to encode a 178 MB WAV file into MPEG-1 Layer 3 format. Still a classic, our MPEG-4 test converts a file from a commercial DVD-ROM into MPEG-4 format using Xmpeg and the Divx codec. We also created an MPEG-2 film using the video-editing software "Pinnacle Studio 7." A regular in our list of benchmarks is determining rendering performance using Newtek's Lightwave (version 7b). We also ran WinACE to test how well the CPU performs when archiving files, a common application in the computing world. Compiling the latest Linux kernel, 2.4.13, has long been a standard benchmark in our repertoire. The Sysmark 2001 benchmark was used to determine office performance.