The End User Pays: 13 Boards With Intel 845GE/PE

Benchmarks Under Windows XP SP1

We performed a total of 23 different benchmark tests in order to obtain the most complete, the most well-balanced view of how the boards with Intel 845GE and 845PE chipsets perform. We ran five different Quake 3 tests to determine OpenGL performance. The different MPEG encoding benchmarks provided 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 converted a file from a commercial DVD-ROM into MPEG-4 format using FlaskMpeg and the DivX codec 5.02. A regular in our list of benchmarks is determining rendering performance using Cinema 4D XL 7.303. We also ran the new WinACE 2.1 to test how well the CPU performs when archiving files, a common application in the computing world. The PC-Mark 2002 benchmark was used to determine CPU and multimedia performance. The new SPECviewperf benchmark version 7 offered a comprehensive 3D benchmark suite. The 3D gaming performance was tested under DirectX8 using 3D Mark 2001 and Comanche 4. New to our test is Unreal Tournament 2003. Last but not least, there is also the synthetic benchmark SiSoft Sandra Pro 2002.

OpenGL Performance: Quake 3 Arena

Asus, Aopen and Gigabyte took the lead in all five run-throughs of the Quake 3 Arena time-demo. The Biostar scored well only at a higher FSB clock speed.