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I/O Application & Application Benchmarks

HD Tach IDE

HD Tach SATA

Lame MP3 Encoding

The EpoX ends up with the best CPU utilization numbers in HD Tach. Throughput is near the top also. The CPU usage for SATA in particular is much lower than that of the AOpen and the Gigabyte. In MP3 encoding, the EpoX rounds out the rear being 10 seconds slower than the Gigabyte.

Audio Testing

Both K8T800 Boards use the AC'97 Codecs while the K8NNXP uses the NForce APU. Surprisingly, the NForce APU does not support Hardware Directsound3D nor does it support EAX even with the OpenAL library installed. In Directsound we see that the processor usage on the K8T800 boards are much lower than that of the NForce150 based K8NNXP. The AOpen is a tad more efficient than the EpoX in all three audio tests however.

Call of Duty is our real world 3D sound test. We usually run Call of Duty with the audio options set to a minimum. The baseline benchmark is with low quality Miles 2D sound while EAX2 at maxmimum quality settings is used. Again, like in the Rightmark Audio tests, the AOpen edges out the EpoX.