I will be using an AMD test bed to compare against this Albatron Intel motherboard. In the future I will review more Intel LGA775 motherboards which will be a better comparison. Because the Albatron PX915G Pro motherboard has a PCI-Express slot and the Albatron K8X800 Pro II motherboard has an AGP slot I had to use different video cards. Currently there are very few PCI-Express cards on the market because the factor is so new. The best card I had on hand was an Albatron PCX5750 and the closest AGP card I had was a XFX GeForceFX 5700 Ultra. Because the clock speed on the 5700 Ultra is much faster than that of the PCX5750 the benchmarks that stress the video card are going to reflect higher than if both motherboards were using equal video cards. Also keep in mind that I am using a 2.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 and a 2.0GHz AMD Athlon 64 which are also not equal.
Test systems
Albatron PX915G Pro, Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz LGA775, 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair TWINX1024-3200LL DDR400 (2-2-2-5), Albatron PCX5750 (425/500), 30GB 7200RPM Western Digital hard drive, Thermaltake Jungle512 heatsink, Windows XP SP1a and DirectX 9b.
Albatron K8X800 Pro II, AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz), 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair TWINX1024-3200LL DDR400 (2-2-2-5), XFX GeForceFX 5700 Ultra (300/950), 30GB 7200RPM Western Digital hard drive, Zalman 7000-Cu, Windows XP SP1a and DirectX 9b.
SYSmark 2004 Internet Content Creation
The overall score for SYSmark 2004 internet content creation was exactly the same for both of the systems. This was pretty surprising since it was the only benchmark that was exactly the same.
SYSmark 2004 Office Productivity
With the office productivity of SYSmark 2004 the Albatron PX915G Pro did a little better. The scores are not much different which could have been for many different reasons.
RealStorm Benchmark 2004
RealStorm does not test the video card at all which makes it a great benchmark for motherboards, CPUs, and memory. All of the options were left at the default except I changed it to 640×480. The K8X800 Pro II did substantially better than the PX915G Pro even thoguh the actual processor speed was lower.
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Benchmark
Memory bandwidth was much higher with the PX915G Pro compared to the K8X800 Pro II. One major reason is because the K8X800 does not support dual channel memory.
Everest Home Edition Memory Benchmark
Everest is a free and good benchmarking tool for memory bandwidth. The Albatron PX915G Pro again has much higher memory scores compared to the K8X800 Pro II.
dBpowerAMP
dBpowerAMP is a free music converter which I used to convert a wav to mp3. The Albatron K8X800 Pro II converted it 3 seconds faster than the PX915G Pro.
