CPU Benchmarks

Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things, including better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal) at the expense of heat and temperature. It also gives in essence an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, memory subtimings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the system build.

Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link

3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.

3D Particle Movement: Single Threaded

3D Particle Movement: MultiThreaded

Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link

Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.

WinRAR 5.01, 2867 files, 1.52 GB

Image Manipulation – FastStone Image Viewer 4.9: link

Similarly to WinRAR, the FastStone test us updated for 2014 to the latest version. FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and thus single threaded performance is often the winner.

FastStone Image Viewer 4.9

Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link

Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. The principle today is still the same, primarily as an output for H.264 + AAC/MP3 audio within an MKV container. In our test we use the same videos as in the Xilisoft test, and results are given in frames per second.

HandBrake v0.9.9 LQ Film

HandBrake v0.9.9 2x4K

Rendering – PovRay 3.7: link

The Persistence of Vision RayTracer, or PovRay, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.

POV-Ray 3.7 Beta RC4

Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link

As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.

7-zip Benchmark

Sunspider 1.0.2

Sunspider 1.0.2

Kraken 1.1

Kraken 1.1

GIGABYTE AM1M-S2H In The Box, System Benchmarks Gaming Benchmarks
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  • HardwareDufus - Sunday, August 17, 2014 - link

    I couldn't imagine trashing perfectly good CoreDuo machines. Maybe someday you could gift some of that stuff to the uncivilised world.
  • jabber - Monday, August 18, 2014 - link

    A C2D machine is a very different beast to the pre 21st century trash being talked about here.

    For me if its single core and single core only it gets trashed. No exceptions. Ahh well actually PentiumD machines get trashed too.
  • Dark Zero - Wednesday, August 20, 2014 - link

    Don't undestimate Pentium D. Using a SSD makes it useful again.
  • jabber - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link

    Yes as a toaster oven I guess. Hot junk.

    Pay the extra $2 and get the C2D on Ebay. You'll get the $2 back in energy savings in no time.
  • Oxford Guy - Sunday, August 17, 2014 - link

    I just put Xubuntu Linux on a Shuttle SK-41G with an Athlon XP 2400+ and 768 MB of RAM. I stuck an ATI 2400 Pro in it to get working video. It was running XP but since there are no more patches I switched it over. Xubuntu was the only thing I could get to work, other than Windows. No other Linux I tried (or even FreeBSD) would boot. Someone I know is using the machine as his main computer, along with one of those really old super loud IBM keyboards.
  • Dirk_Funk - Sunday, August 17, 2014 - link

    I'm picturing you as a kind of Johnny Appleseed of computing.
  • MikeMurphy - Sunday, August 17, 2014 - link

    Very motivating. Thanks for sharing this.
  • Phillip Wager - Friday, August 15, 2014 - link

    i just wish there was an AM1 mini itx board that had dual lan for teaming im looking to build a NAS by the end of the year and the low power consumption from the kabani quad cores really intrigues me but i dont want to go micro atx sized an then buy a lan card. (the pci-e slot will be taken up by a RAID card) the lack of dual lan has me considering going intel because they have haswell celerons/i3/i5 processors coming out soon that will consume only 35watts and that should get the job done. and although it will only be dual core honestly the am1 jaguar quadcore was overkill in the first place so its not that big a deal.
  • WatcherCK - Saturday, August 16, 2014 - link

    I wonder if the board supports unbuffered ECC RAM? The Asus AM1M board supports ECC unofficially:
    http://www.overclock.net/t/1495837/ecc-works-on-am...
    Add a cheap LSI from ebay and low power NAS at a lower cost than the C2550 and 2750 Atoms, you dont get dual (or even) Intel LAN or dual channel memory however.
  • wintermute000 - Saturday, August 16, 2014 - link

    If you have enough requirements for dual LAN/teaming then you're probably going to want more grunt than AM1 can provide anyway. In any event bay trial (cheap) / avoton (expensive) are perfectly viable options NOW.

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