Compared to the MSI/Via based motherboard the ATI chipset shows some very decent increases in performance overall and in CPU tests. The 100 point gap in CPU being most impressive.

Sisoft Sandra results overall don’t quite show the performance gaps of PCMark with both chipsets being very close in performance. Dhrystone however is a good win for ATI with a 600 point gap.

Photoshop 7

Adobe Photoshop is the premier standard image editing software. Used by professionals and novices world around it is the most powerful Image software available. Thanks to Allan "Zardon" Campbell we now have a standard Adobe Photoshop benchmarking script for use here at Driverheaven. The scripts main purpose is to isolate and stress a CPU alone and give us the results.

The action script is setup to apply certain filters and includes some professional editing commands. It is set not to go into layers. If you apply several layers to a large file then paging will occur and then the hard drive comes into play. Which means the CPU itself is not stressed. The basis for this bench is to stress only the CPU as much as possible.

The bench is run with a 40 MB file. The DH action script is already loaded in the actions pane. The image is loaded and then timed with the built in timer in Adobe.

The small 0.5s difference shown in the table doesn’t tell the whole story. Over the course of a day using Photoshop you would save a decent amount of time with every function being that little bit quicker on the ATI based system.

Imtoo DVD Encoder

Our encoding test is run using ImTOO DVD Ripper ( http://www.imtoo.com/ ) and involves taking a 225mb vob file and encoding to DivX (31mb). The time taken was recorded with ImTOO.

The ATI chipset again shows some excellent performance increases over the older VIA chipset. Over the course of a full DVD you would save some considerable time on the ATI based system

The following 2 game tests were run at minimum detail so as to remove any GFX related performance bottlenecks and show how the rest of the system performs.

Colin McRae Rally 2005

Colin Mcrae Rally 2005 has a huge performance gap between the two systems, nearly 20fps. In this test we really see the potential of the ATI chipset and how the gains in the synthetic PCMark tests are transferred into a real world situation.

Rome Total Wars

Rome Total Wars Battle Engine was used on our RTW test, with 3 different armies involved in a battle there is a lot going on. In this situation we see an 11% increase in performance by using the ATI chipset.

 

Next: Game Tests

Select 1. Introduction 2. The Board 3. System/CPU Tests 4. Game Tests 5. Onboard Graphics 6. Conclusion