Performance and Benchmarks:

Our test system:

• Intel Pentium 4 3.0C 800mhz fsb (Intel ES unlocked sample)
• Gigabyte 8IPE1000 Pro2 – W
• AOpen AX4SG Max II
• Intel Stock HSF
• ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (No overclocking)
• WD 36.7gb 10,000rpm Raptor Hard drive
• OCZ 3700 Gold Rev2 (Timings of 2-5-3-2 for all default test – 2.85 vDIMM)

FutureMark; Bapco SYSmark2004:

SYSmark2004 provides an application-based benchmark that accurately reflects usage patterns for business users in the areas of Internet Content Creation and Office Productivity.

We can see that the Gigabyte slightly edges out the AOpen in the Sysmark suite of benchmarks.

Everest 1.1:

Everest 1.1 is a professional system information, diagnostics and benchmarking program for Win32 platforms. It extracts details of all components of the PC. It also tests the actual read and write speeds of your memory giving a fairly accurate look of true memory performance.

Once again we see the Gigabyte boards slightly outdoing the AOpen 856 board. It is close, but still Gigabyte is just a tad faster!.

Futuremark; PCMark2004:

PCMark04 is the latest version of the popular PCMark series. PCMark04 is an application-based benchmark and a premium tool for measuring overall PC performance. It uses portions of real applications instead of including very large applications or using specifically created code. This allows PCMark04 to be a smaller installation as well as to report very accurate results.

The trend continues! Here we once again see the Gigabyte slightly outperforming the AOpen board. Gigabyte seems to have done their homework when designing the board and tweaking it out! Let’s see if the trend keeps on going!

Massive Development; AquaMark3:

The AquaMark3 executes a complete state-of-the-art game engine and generates 3D scenes designed to make the same demands on hardware as a modern game. The utilized game engine, the krass Engine, has been used in Aquanox and AquaNox 2: Revelation as well as in the upcoming RTS Spellforce by Phenomic Game Development. AquaMark3 utilizes recent hardware features of the new DirectX 9 API, such as PixelShader 2.0, while staying fully backward compatible to DirectX 8 and 7 graphics hardware

We have a mixed result here! The Gigabyte and AOpen split, with the AOpen taking the CPU test and the Gigabyte taking the graphics test.

Epic Games; Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo Benchmark Utility:

Here we used the UT2003 Demo benchmark utility that is included in the demo download.

To say the least, I was very surprised to see the results of this test! The Gigabyte board fell to the AOpen board by just a slight margin! Both 865PE boards give a strong showing though.

Futuremark 3dMark 2001 build 330;

Once again, in the area of graphics, the Gigabyte board falls to the AOpen. These boards are very close in performance, which is what you would expect from two boards with the same chipset.