Benchmarking (continued):
PCMark05 - Futuremark's PCMark05 benchmarks the entire system, not just one aspect of it. As I've come to expect, the ECS motherboard pushed the Gigabyte motherboard aside both in base tests and overclocked tests.
PiFast - PiFast is a simple program designed to calculate Pi to a certain number of digits. I used the Chudnovsky method at 1024k calculations, and calculated to 1,000,000 places. The bench below shows the amount of time (in seconds) it took to complete, and quicker is better.
HD Tach v3.0.1.0 - I also wanted to see what kind of hard drive performance to expect with the onboard SATA controller. I tested my Seagate 80GB SATA drives in both RAID 0 and single drive configurations. Not much performance increase came from overclocking. Surprisingly, there was a bit of a performance difference between the two boards.
3DMark03 - 3DMark03 is another popular benchmark by Futuremark, and it provides a good overall graphics benchmark. This test uses real-world gaming events to provide a true demonstration of the systems abilities. The higher the score, the better it is. Here you can see the ECS board nudges out the Gigabyte board.
3DMark05 - 3DMark05 is the latest version of the popular benchmarking suite. It is a serious test for even the most modern cards and puts some serious stress on a card as it tries to get through it. Once again, the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme defeats the Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI.
