Intel Core Duo: AOpen i975Xa-YDG to the Rescue
by Gary Key on May 4, 2006 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Synthetic Graphics Performance
The 3DMark series of benchmarks developed and provided by Futuremark are among the most widely used tools for benchmark reporting and comparisons. Although the benchmarks are very useful for providing apple to apple comparisons across a broad array of GPU and CPU configurations they are not a substitute for actual application and gaming benchmarks. In this sense we consider the 3DMark benchmarks to be purely synthetic in nature but still valuable for providing consistent measurements of performance.
In our first tests, the combination of the Intel Core Duo and AOpen i975Xa-YDG makes for an impressive showing against the AMD Opteron 165/175 and Asus A8R32-MVP setup at both stock and overclocked settings. The Intel platform had no issues running the full 3DMark series when overclocked but our AMD platform struggled at first until we dialed in the right mix of voltages and memory settings.
General System Performance
The PCMark05 benchmark developed and provided by Futuremark was designed for determining overall system performance for the typical home computing user. This tool provides both system and component level benchmarking results utilizing subsets of real world applications or programs. This benchmark is useful for providing comparative results across a broad array of Graphics subsystems, CPU, Hard Disk, and Memory configurations along with multithreading results. In this sense we consider the PCMark benchmark to be both synthetic and real world in nature while providing consistency in our benchmark results.
The margins are closer in the PCMark05 results but the Intel platform continues to show an advantage over the AMD platform at stock and overclocked settings. It is obvious from our test results that we can expect even greater results from the Conroe and Merom processor series.
Rendering Performance
We have added the Cinebench 9.5 and POV-RAY 3.6 benchmarks as they heavily stress the CPU subsystem while performing graphics modeling and rendering. We utilize the standard benchmark demos in each program along with the default settings. Cinebench 9.5 features two different benchmarks with one test utilizing a single core and the second test showcasing the power of multiple cores in rendering the benchmark image. We had planned on generating 3dsmax 7 benchmarks but our AMD platform would not complete the underwater benchmark. We are still investigating this issue.
The Intel Core Duo desktop platform showed its strength in the extremely demanding POV-RAY benchmark, bettering the AMD platform by 18%. In our limited testing with the Asus N4L-VM featuring the 945GM mobile chipset our stock Intel Core Duo numbers were slightly better than the AMD platform in the Cinebench 9.5 benchmark and only about 6% greater in the POV-RAY benchmark indicating AOpen's choice of the i975x chipset certainly makes a difference in the performance ability of the Core Duo.
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JarredWalton - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Why did someone mod this post down? I'm serious: if you put an H in brackets, the AT comments engine interprets that as "turn on white text". No insult was intended towards HardOCP; I'm merely pointing out that Frumious' post turned the text white, unintentionally. Thanks for the negative mod points.... :|Frumious1 - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Anyone else getting white text? What's up with that?Test:
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Did that help?
goinginstyle - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
At least the quote was a bit different this time but still not needed. I thought the article was great and actually one of the best ones I have read lately. It was nice to finally see two like platforms compared against each other with the same cpu speeds and components although AMD2 would have been good to see.You really should do more of these comparisons as the reviewing one motherboard against another in the same product family gets boring. You never see much of a variance in the scores so the only question is if it sucks or not. At least this way you review the board and compare it against something you might be thinking about buying if you are a Intel or AMD user. You honestly get to see what works best for you. It was nice to see additional real application benchmarks instead of the same old winstone that or 3dmark this.
I was disappointed in not seeing any Photoshop benchmarks or something that has to do with graphics, it would round out your audio and video benchmarks nicely. Anyway, keep up the good work and hopefully you can do this same type of article when Conroe gets here against the AMD products.
In the meantime props to Intel for finally showing some performance improvement without needing a nuclear powerplant for the CPU.
goinginstyle - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Any numbers yet?goinginstyle - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
....and temperature readings???Gary Key - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
We pulled the charts, the AOpen board uses a thermal sensor instead of the on-chip diode so our numbers are off. Once we decide what number to utilize, these numbers will be posted. If you refer to our Yonah Preview article, the power consumption numbers are listed for the 945GM board. I posted a couple of numbers earlier in this thread with the AOpen board. Thanks....goinginstyle - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Thank you for the update and hopefully we can see these numbers soon.BigLan - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
"The rear panel contains the standard PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, parallel port, LAN port, and 4 USB ports."Looking at the picture, I don't see a parallel port there and it's not listed on the specs either. Did you mean a firewire port?
Also, how useful is the external sata connector? Does the board come with a cable to utilise the power connector?
Gary Key - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Sorry about that, yes, it was suppose to be Firewire. I had it corrected on my final draft and missed it twice in the edits.AOpen ships an excellent cable that has the drive and power port plugs together. I found the external connector to be very useful during testing on the JMicron chipset. Since I really enjoy HTPC tinkering, it will be of great usefulness for attaching or swapping large PVR drives out without entering the system. The JMicron chipset performed very well in our testing and had no issues handling Seagate's new 750GB drive.
BigLan - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Thanks for the reply. Any chance you need an independent review doing on that 750GB drive ;)