One Tough Cookie: 10 Boards with Intel i875P Chipset: Part I

Benchmarks

We performed several different benchmark tests in order to obtain the most complete, well-balanced view of how these motherboards with Intel i875P chipsets perform. The benchmark results provide a clear performance overview for a total of five different boards.

OpenGL performance was measured by five different Quake 3 tests; Direct3D performance from the DirectX package was measured by the 3D Mark 2001 SE (based on DirectX 8).

The different MPEG-encoding benchmarks provide a comprehensive testing environment; "mp3 Makers Platinium" was used to encode a 178 MB WAV file into MPEG-1 Layer 3 format. A newcomer to the test is Xmpeg, version 5.0b, with the Divx codec 5.05. We also converted a DV video (1.2 GB) into an MPEG-2 file using Main Concept 1.3. Additionally, we created an MPEG-2 film using the latest version of the entry-level video-editing software Pinnacle Studio 8.5

A regular in our list of benchmarks is determining rendering performance using Newtek's Lightwave 7.5, 3D Studio Max 5.1 and Cinema 4D XL 8.1. The latter of these software packages has just been updated; we have incorporated the latest version. We also ran the new Winrar 3.11 archiver to test how well the CPU performs when archiving files, a common application in the computing world.

SiSoft Sandra 2003 SP1 is another standard in our benchmark repertoire. Nor did we forget Unreal Tournament 2003 and Comanche 4, both established 3D games for DirectX 8. PC Mark 2002 is of interest to overclockers in particular in finding comparison values for overclocking performance.