SiSoft Sandra – Processor Arithmetic
The same story is told in the Processor Arithmetic benchmarks. These tests place pressure on the CPU with the most basic of functions; testing both integer and floating point math calculation. It’s all very dry, and unfortunately so is our result. The Asus M4A79T Deluxe deviates little from the baseline results we established in our review of it’s competitor.
SiSoft Sandra – Processor Multimedia
At the risk of sound like a broken record, nothing really changes when we try testing Processor Multimedia. These tests are pretty self explanatory, testing the rendering and display of media. Once again the Asus M4A79T Deluxe comes extremely close to it’s competitor in terms of performance, with such a little difference barely registering. I think we need to look at some other aspects of testing, before this gets to be the most boring round of benchmarks ever.
Hard Disk I/O: Part Deux
In our AMD Platform Showdown, we found that the latest boards sporting AMD chipsets were taking significant hit in hard drive performance. I have yet to find out exactly why. There’s speculation that it’s a driver or chipset issue. This review should give us some insight into whether or not it’s a hardware issue, possibly relating to the BIOS or something on the mobo itself.
Our first test with this in mind both shows general promise and an advantage in Asus’ direction. The PCMark Vantage Hard Drives test showed a 10% performance increase in favour of the M4A79T Deluxe. That’s actually a decent amount, and not a statistical anomaly. Even better then that, it’s actually up there with the fastest board in our showdown.
The raw transfer speed results we achieved in the SiSoftware Sandra Physical Disks benchmark tell much the same story. Though it’s still not in the triple digits, the results posted by the Asus board are 3% faster then the GIGABYTE board, and are coming close to slower of the two platforms.
These performance increases might be due to the lower access times posted by the Asus board. We managed to get a confirmed, replicatable access time below 7ms with our WD VelociRaptor. I wouldn’t mind having a decent SSD to really settle the score on these boards. For now we’ll have to work with what we have, and what we have is slightly improved I/O performance. It doesn’t have me jumping for joy, but I like where we are heading.