Intel Core Duo: AOpen i975Xa-YDG to the Rescue
by Gary Key on May 4, 2006 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Audio Performance
We limited audio testing to the Rightmark 3D Sound version 2.2 CPU utilization test and tested with sound enabled to show the performance effects on several games. The Rightmark 3D Sound benchmark measures the overhead or CPU utilization required by a codec or hardware audio chip.
The Realtek ALC-880 HD audio codec on the AOpen board was tested with the recently released 1.36 driver set. The Realtek DirectSound audio drivers do not support more than 32 hardware buffers and the OpenAL 1.1 drivers do not support more than 30 hardware buffers at this time so the scores cannot be directly compared to the Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi cards in the benchmarks.
It is interesting to note the reduced CPU utilization with the Core Duo or Opteron 165 as the load is balanced between each processor with the Realtek 1.36 drivers and the Creative drivers to a certain extent. However, these CPU utilization rate improvements with the dual-core setup does not have any bearing on actual game benchmarks as the reduction in frame rate percentages are the same as our single core score.
The Realtek ALC-880 codec offers very competitive CPU utilization rates when compared to the Realtek ALC-882 on the Asus board. The ALC-880 generates significantly better audio quality than the AC97 based systems and very similar audio quality to the ALC-882 solution. The ALC-880 was released before the ALC-882 but has nearly the same audio quality and performance in our testing. Our subjective headphone testing revealed a slight difference between the two codecs, with the output from the ALC-882 sounding clearer in the treble and mid-range tones. However, the difference was negligible when utilizing our 4, 5.1, or 7.1 speaker setup in a typical room environment. The Sound Blaster X-Fi has the lowest overall CPU utilization (single core systems) with the ALC-880 and the ALC-882 following closely. Let's find out how these results translate into real world numbers.
The audio performance numbers remain consistent as the Realtek ALC-880 consistently finishes near the SoundBlaster X-Fi in the benchmarks. Serious Sam II has an average loss of 37%, Battlefield 2 at 28%, and F.E.A.R. at 2%. F.E.A.R. is extremely GPU limited so the CPU has additional cycles to generate the audio streams required by the Realtek drivers.
The overall output quality of audio with the Realtek ALC-880 ranks with the ALC-882/883 series as the best of the on-board HD audio solutions we have heard to date, while performance continues to improve with each driver release. The vast majority of users should have no issues utilizing the ALC-880 as their primary audio solution considering the quality of audio and performance at this time in most applications.
Obviously, if you are a serious gamer, then a dedicated sound card is still useful to ensure consistent frame rate averages across a wide variety of games, and in the case of the Sound Blaster X-Fi, you also get improved audio quality and EAX3/4/5 support. If you'd like more details on the Realtek solution, you can refer to the Realtek ALC-880 Specifications.
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JarredWalton - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Why did someone mod this post down? I'm serious: if you put an H in brackets, the AT comments engine interprets that as "turn on white text". No insult was intended towards HardOCP; I'm merely pointing out that Frumious' post turned the text white, unintentionally. Thanks for the negative mod points.... :|Frumious1 - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Anyone else getting white text? What's up with that?Test:
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Did that help?
goinginstyle - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
At least the quote was a bit different this time but still not needed. I thought the article was great and actually one of the best ones I have read lately. It was nice to finally see two like platforms compared against each other with the same cpu speeds and components although AMD2 would have been good to see.You really should do more of these comparisons as the reviewing one motherboard against another in the same product family gets boring. You never see much of a variance in the scores so the only question is if it sucks or not. At least this way you review the board and compare it against something you might be thinking about buying if you are a Intel or AMD user. You honestly get to see what works best for you. It was nice to see additional real application benchmarks instead of the same old winstone that or 3dmark this.
I was disappointed in not seeing any Photoshop benchmarks or something that has to do with graphics, it would round out your audio and video benchmarks nicely. Anyway, keep up the good work and hopefully you can do this same type of article when Conroe gets here against the AMD products.
In the meantime props to Intel for finally showing some performance improvement without needing a nuclear powerplant for the CPU.
goinginstyle - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Any numbers yet?goinginstyle - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
....and temperature readings???Gary Key - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
We pulled the charts, the AOpen board uses a thermal sensor instead of the on-chip diode so our numbers are off. Once we decide what number to utilize, these numbers will be posted. If you refer to our Yonah Preview article, the power consumption numbers are listed for the 945GM board. I posted a couple of numbers earlier in this thread with the AOpen board. Thanks....goinginstyle - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Thank you for the update and hopefully we can see these numbers soon.BigLan - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
"The rear panel contains the standard PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, parallel port, LAN port, and 4 USB ports."Looking at the picture, I don't see a parallel port there and it's not listed on the specs either. Did you mean a firewire port?
Also, how useful is the external sata connector? Does the board come with a cable to utilise the power connector?
Gary Key - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Sorry about that, yes, it was suppose to be Firewire. I had it corrected on my final draft and missed it twice in the edits.AOpen ships an excellent cable that has the drive and power port plugs together. I found the external connector to be very useful during testing on the JMicron chipset. Since I really enjoy HTPC tinkering, it will be of great usefulness for attaching or swapping large PVR drives out without entering the system. The JMicron chipset performed very well in our testing and had no issues handling Seagate's new 750GB drive.
BigLan - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Thanks for the reply. Any chance you need an independent review doing on that 750GB drive ;)