915 Motherboard Roundup: Socket 775 for the Rest of Us

General Performance and Encoding

All tested motherboards were based on the same Intel 915 chipset and tested with the same CPU. The only difference was the memory supported by the board - either DDR or DDR2. So was DDR or DDR2 the winner? As we saw in our launch review for the 925X/915, the performance of fast DDR400 and DDR2-533 at aggressive timings is about the same. Having said that, some will still be surprised to see that there is really no winner in DDR or DDR2 in Winstones, even though we are comparing fast 2-2-2-5 DDR400 to fast DDR2-533 at 3-3-3-10. There is also no clear pattern of DDR2 or DDR performing better in these results. It appears that the performance is more dependent on the quality of the design than the type of memory used by the 915 board.

The same is true in results for PCMark 2004. There is a greater overall variation in PCmark scores, but no real pattern in terms of the type of memory used on the board. However, it is surprising to see such a wide range of results on PCMark 2004 tests on boards using the same chipset. The range of scores from 5000 to almost 5700 using the same CPU is extremely large. You will definitely see the performance difference in these boards. All the boards, but 4, are clustered between 5457 to 5690, but the bottom 4 boards are significantly slower with scores from 5007 to 5310.

2-pass Media Encoding results with AutoGk 1.6 and the DivX 5.2.1 Codec also reveal no clear performance pattern with either DDR or DDR2. You can choose either memory on a 915 board and be confident that performance will be competitive with other 915 boards and memory configurations.

One pattern that will emerge as we take a closer look at the benchmarks is that the same few motherboards are at the top of our test results over and over again. This will be even clearer in the DirectX 9 gaming tests. For those of you interested in comparisons to the Athlon 64, it is interesting that the FX55 totally dominates Winstones. On the other side, PCMark 2004 is dominated by the Intel boards. Clearly, both results cannot be correct, but are more a reflection of the design of each test and the features supported in each benchmark.