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Soltek SL-86SPE-L (Springdale) Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Benchmarks - Real World
Gaming Performance
Serious Sam is a great FPS game that brings back many things that made FPS fun, TONS of things to shoot!!. Even with
conservative settings this game will tax even the fastest of computers.
I used the default fresh installed settings for this benchmark. If you'd like to do your own Serious Sam demo benchmark bring down the console and type "dem_bProfile=1" (w/out quotes), exit the console then choose a demo from the main menu. When the demo is complete pull down the console again to see your score.
I used the default fresh installed settings for this benchmark. If you'd like to do your own Serious Sam demo benchmark bring down the console and type "dem_bProfile=1" (w/out quotes), exit the console then choose a demo from the main menu. When the demo is complete pull down the console again to see your score.
Serious Sam: Second Encounter.
My personal favorite, Quake 3. We used the high-quality settings with the resolution set at 1024x768 32-bit color.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein. For this benchmark we used a multi-player demo called checkpoint.
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.
Unreal Tournament 2003. UT2003 comes with a built in benchmarking tool that will run a series of botmatch timedemos and record the
scores for you. The benchmark was run in the default configuration.
Content Creation Winstone 2003
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,
Adobe Premiere 6.0, Macromedia Director 8.5.1, Macromedia Dreamweaver 4, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055, Netscape 6.2.3,
NewTek's LightWave 7.5, and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 6.0.
Business Winstone 2002
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 five Microsoft Office 2002 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Word),
Microsoft Project 2000, Lotus Notes, WinZip 8.0, Norton AntiVirus, and Netscape Communicator.
Real World Conclusion
The real world benchmarks really surprised me this time around; some of the gaming benchmarks were way off compared to the reference system, while other tests posted similar numbers. When it comes to the Winstone tests the roles are reversed. In the Content Creation realm the 86SPE falls behind the reference system. Then much to my surprise the Business test posted higher. Given that the only real difference between the two systems is the choice in hard drives. I consulted with Soltek to see if they noticed any efficiency problems when using the SerialATA. They confirmed my suspicions saying that SerialATA drives, despite some running at 10k RPM, are not as efficient as Parallel ATA drives at the moment. The reason the Business Winstone score is higher is due to the lower seek time of the Raptor drive but whem moving lots of data around, as is the case in the Content Creation test, begins to show the downfall of the SerialATA drive.
