Socket 775 Micro-ATX MSI motherboards review

Page 5 - Benchmarks

Maxon Cinebench R10

We begin with Maxon Cinebench. It's based on the animation software Cinema 4D, used in a number of movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars and The Chronicles of Narnia. It has a component that tests the processor performance and has also good multi-threading support.

With the Cinebench, we measured close performance rating with Intel chipset based motherboards, while Nvidia was a tad behind. But Nvidia did measure the biggest performance increase when using Multithreading. As for the performance of the graphical controllers - no surprises here. Integrated solutions generally don't perform too well, though Nvidia still does better here too.

Paint.NET x32 3.05

PDNBench is a benchmark based on the popular 64 bit free software for picture editing Pain.NET. PDNBench tests the and displays the sum of time required for performing a variety of different operations, commonly used when editing pictures - scaling, zooming, decreasing, cutting, compressing and so on.

Same thing here. Intel's lead together, Nvidia follows closely.

Lame

As the name suggests, this is the famously known software for audio encoding in LAME, with multi-threading support. We used the benchmark with the supplied 20MB .WAV fail, compressed in .MP3 of course.

No surprises. МР3 compression rates with the three motherboards are equal.

WinRAR 3.71

Is there anything we can say about WinRAR, that you don't already know... The integrated benchmark has multi-threading support and is quite indicative. We measured the time for compressing 100MB source.

Now we're cooking with gas! Clearly Р-35 is the leader. Nvidia is slower with 25 seconds and Intel 945 with additional 41 seconds. A clear example of high end motherboard performance thrown in the faces of our two Micro ATX claimants.

SuperPI

The famous SuperPI... We used the version from our colleagues from XtremeSystems, that supports multi-threading.

Here Intel P-35 and NVIDIA chipsets perform similarly, followed closely by Intel 945.

As whole, the two micro ATX cannot measure up to their bigger brothers in the higher class, but still they do perform admirably in a contest. In some of the test the Intel based solution leads, in others the NVIDIA one. The overall lower performance is not an issue in our opinion, since it's not that far from high-end products, and besides these motherboards are а first of all cheap and small.