ECS P67H2-A Review: A visit back to Lucid's Hydra
by Ian Cutress on July 21, 2011 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Lucid
- P67
- ECS
3D Movement Algorithm Test - link
The first benchmark ran is actually one I have written. My full time job involves computational chemistry, so this first benchmark uses various algorithms for three-dimensional simulation and movement of independent particles. The algorithms both employ uniform random number generation or normal distribution random number generation, and vary in various amounts of trigonometric operations, conditional statements, generation and rejection, fused operations, etc. The benchmark runs through six algorithms for a specified number of particles and steps, and calculates the speed of each algorithm, then sums them all for a final score. This is an example of a real world situation that a computational scientist may find themselves in, rather than a pure synthetic benchmark. The benchmark is also parallel between particles simulated, and we test the single thread performance as well as the multi-threaded performance.
In terms of pure throughput, the ECS board brings up no surprises and falls well within the margin of error compared to other boards.
WinRAR x64 3.93 - link
With 64-bit WinRAR, we compress the set of files used in the USB speed tests. WinRAR x64 3.93 attempts to use multithreading when possible.
In this test, the ECS board equals our best ever result of 244 seconds.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.2 - link
FastStone Image Viewer is a free piece of software I have been using for quite a few years now. It allows quick viewing of flat images, as well as resizing, changing color depth, adding simple text or simple filters. It also has a bulk image conversion tool, which we use here. The software currently operates only in single-thread mode, which should change in later versions of the software. For this test, we convert a series of 170 files, of various resolutions, dimensions and types (of a total size of 163MB), all to the .gif format of 640x480 dimensions.
Sorenson Squeeze 6.0 - link
Sorenson Squeeze is a professional video encoder, complete with a vast array of options. For this test, we convert 32 HD videos, each a minute long and approximately 42 MB in size, to WMV 512KBps format. Squeeze can encode multiple videos at once, one for each thread.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
22 Comments
View All Comments
MWilliamson - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
An excellent review Ian; I'm impressed by how many combinations you tested under Hydra. While I'm currently not looking to build another system, I have found Hydra to be an interesting concept, and I'm waiting for it to mature to the point where it is valid for all configurations.What I wished to comment on though, was your comment in the Gaming Benchmarks:
"Metro 2033 is the Crysis of the DirectX 11 world (or at least until Crysis 2 is released)..."
Crysis 2 HAS been released, and has been available since April. Granted at the time of release it did not support DirectX 11, due largely in part to it being launched simultaenously on PC and consoles, a recent patch (released June 27th) has added its DirectX 11 feature set, and another patch increased the texture quality for PC gamers, both of which are actually optional, free upgrades. The most recent version, 1.9, also added a demo level which can be run via the in-game console; personally I have no experience with that side of things, since I played through for the storyline, but it is there, and I'd imagine its something you could add to your benchmarking suite, should it suit whatever your requirements are.
IanCutress - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
Many thanks on the update :) Not had much time to play games recently, but at some point I want to update the GPU drivers in my reviews also. Updating GPU drivers essentially removes all previous GPU results, so it might be worth having a look at the games I test as well at the same time.Ian
MWilliamson - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
You're most welcome, I had thought that was a possibility :)Igen - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
Hard to tell from the pics, but are those heatsinks riveted on? Would make mods/repairs difficult.DanNeely - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
The southbridge sink has what look like plastic fasteners; I'd assume they're pushpins of some sort. The moftset/etc sinks are harder too tell because of the angle and not being perfectly in focus, but if you look at the fastener in the lower right on the 5th pic the recessed area shows two indents that look like they're in the right spots to be part of a philips head which is otherwise out of sight. A high resolution vertical image/bottom image would really help.Uritziel - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
MOFTSET lol! I'm going to start saying that :)Death666Angel - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
The green color of the ECS mainboard bars in the graphs for gaming makes little sense here, because then we don't know which resolution was used, as the resolution is identified as the colors. Though of course the higher resolution has most likely the lower fps numbers, it still looks odd. :-)Good review though!
HangFire - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
You got 3? Wow. My old ECS C2D board had one (two if you count the CPU).ECS has really moved up over the years.
fausto412 - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
this solution is junk.dhiiir - Friday, July 22, 2011 - link
I believe that the best motherboard can be ruined with a terrible BIOS or UEFI. UEFI is pretty cool, but if you can't make a good text only implementation, how the hell are you going to make a passable GUI? I'm perfectly happy with a well designed text based UEFI, but I will admit that as much time as I spend with BIOSs and UEFIs, Asus' slick GUI system is clearly in a class by itself. If I were new to the game, I would want something like that on my first build. There just isn't an excuse for terrible BIOS/UEFIs in the year 2011.I like online shopping,but don't know where have a good store to buy . I have a friend said that a shop is very good. -.www.upsfashion.com- I went. Really good. Things are cheap, fashion,. Owner has a good attitude. I am really happy to buy things there.