General Performance & Encoding
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.
The MSI K8N Diamond Plus exhibits excellent performance in the synthetic benchmarks with scores consistently in the top range of all boards tested. The MSI board performed extremely well in the PCMark 2005 benchmark that tests overall performance in a wide range of general applications. Throughout our general application testing and usage we found the board to be very responsive and actually noticed a performance difference in Office 2003 and Photoshop CS compared to other boards in our test lab. Although not reported, this board produced the highest AMD socket 939 WorldBench 5 score during our stability testing.
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.
The MSI K8N Diamond Plus exhibits excellent performance in the synthetic benchmarks with scores consistently in the top range of all boards tested. The MSI board performed extremely well in the PCMark 2005 benchmark that tests overall performance in a wide range of general applications. Throughout our general application testing and usage we found the board to be very responsive and actually noticed a performance difference in Office 2003 and Photoshop CS compared to other boards in our test lab. Although not reported, this board produced the highest AMD socket 939 WorldBench 5 score during our stability testing.
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JarredWalton - Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - link
Just FYI, I've sent Gary a message to check the FEAR and COD2 CF numbers. They seem a bit low to me, but I haven't personally tested a CF system so I can't say for sure. Gary will most likely be on in a couple hours to comment, once he gets out of bed. Which is where I need to go now....Take care,
Jarred Walton
Hardware Editor
AnandTech.com
JarredWalton - Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - link
It looks like the current FEAR and COD2 scores for Crossfire are correct, in that CF doesn't work fully right now. Unlike SLI where profiles can be manually force, CF mostly works or not. Just in case anyone was wondering. :)