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  • DFI Infinity nF4 Ultra Motherboard Review
  • DFI Infinity nF4 Ultra Motherboard Review

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    Benchmarks - Real World

    Gaming Performance
    Unreal Tournament 2004. For this benchmark we used a multi-player demo called Primeval. If you wish to try the demo out for yourself it can be downloaded from the following website or ask me and I'll send you a copy. The timedemo is similar to the one used in Quake III in that once the demo is over you pull down the console to see the average FPS.
    The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. This game has some awesome graphics and is primed for use with next generation video cards. The only drawback is that the game comes with no default timedemo, so we recorded one and used the 2.0 shader for the benchmark. For those of you wanting to try this benchmark for yourself we can make the demo available, simply drop us a line.
    Far Cry. This game is very similar to Serious Sam in that the maps are huge and have a ton of things to shoot. Granted the graphics are quite a bit better and the water textures are something to die for. For this benchmark we used the regulator demo and the following command line. "FarCry.exe -DEVMODE "#demo_num_runs=1" "#demo_quit=1" "#r_Width=800" "#r_Height=600" "map regulator" "demo regulator""
    XviD Movie Encoding Test: This is a new test that was added to cover other sections of real-world performance. The test consists of a simple task of encoding a DVD rip from VOB to AVI with AutoGK 1.25 using the XviD codec. The movie used is the first chapter of Dirty Pair Flash #2 and consisted of 40104 frames. The time shown is how many frames per second were processed during the first pass to encode the video files.
    Content Creation Winstone 2004
    The best of the best when it comes to real world benchmarks, this free program is available from eTesting Labs and uses real programs to test the overall performance of your computer. These programs include: Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1, Adobe Premiere 6.50, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980, NewTek's LightWave 3D 7.5b, and Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f.
    Business Winstone 2004
    Business Winstone is quite similar to the Content Creation benchmark but uses programs that you would most likely use in the office. These programs include Microsoft Access 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Excel 2002 SP-2, Microsoft FrontPage 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Outlook 2002 SP-2, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Project 2002, Microsoft Word 2002 SP-2, WinZip 8.1 SR-1, and Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003.
    Real World Conclusion
    As the charts show real world performance is very similar between the two systems however if you look closely you can see the effects that memory timings play in some of the more memory intensive benchmarks. The gains and losses are very minor but these numbers will compound themselves depending on what other hardware you are using.

    Overclocking is next.