MSI P6N SLI Platinum: NVIDIA's 650i Part Two

CPU Multitasking Results

We devised a script that would compress our standard test folder consisting of 444 files, ten subfolders, and 602MB worth of data, convert a 137MB High Definition QuickTime movie clip to a 37MB MPEG-4 format, play back the first two chapters of Office Space with PowerDVD, and run our AVG anti-virus program in the background. We stop the script when the file compression and video conversion are complete. This is a very taxing script for the CPU, Memory, and Storage subsystems. We also found our overclocking testing to be a good indicator of system stability.


The performance difference basically mirrors our PCMark 2005 tests with the MSI boards finishing first due to great disk performance, though the Intel Chipsets consistently completed the QuickTime Conversion first - this is possibly due to the better memory bandwidth results Sandra showed. The DFI RD600 board scores last though it generated the best video playback results. We noticed it would stutter at times when converting the QuickTime file that led to its last place finish. The one surprise in this category is the ASUS P965 board as they generally do extremely well in multitasking scenarios under PCMark 2005. After reviewing the results we noticed the PowerDVD playback was not smooth and experienced several pauses. We are still looking into this and hopefully will have an answer soon.

Media Encoding Performance

Our first encoding test is quite easy - we take our original Office Space DVD and use AnyDVD Ripper to copy the full DVD to the hard drive without compression, thus providing an almost exact duplicate of the DVD. We then fire up Nero Recode 2, selected our Office Space copy on the hard drive, and perform a shrink operation to allow the entire movie along with extras to fit on a single 4.5GB DVD disc. We leave all options on their defaults except we check off the advanced analysis option. The scores reported include the full encoding process and are represented in minutes and seconds, with lower numbers indicating better performance.


We continue to see a strong performance from the MSI 650i in our application tests. In previous testing our ASUS 650i and 680i boards were almost two minutes slower in this test as we consistently found the performance of the 680i/650i to be lacking due to disk access issues. The conversion process would consistently slow down while the disk was being accessed. The quality of the video conversion was never affected but it appeared under heavy CPU usage that disk performance suffered. After the latest round of BIOS and driver updates these two boards now score close to the other chipsets, with the MSI board now leading the Intel chipsets.

Audio Encoding Performance

While the media encoding prowess of the Intel chipset boards were superb in our initial media encoding testing, we wanted to see how they faired on the audio side. Our audio test suite consists of Exact Audio Copy v095.b4 and LAME 3.98a3. We utilize the INXS Greatest Hits CD that contains 16 tracks totaling 606MB of one time '80s hits.

We set up EAC for variable bit rate encoding, burst mode for extraction, use external program for compression, and to start the external compressor upon extraction. (EAC will read the next track while LAME is working on the previous track, thus removing a potential bottleneck with the optical drive.) We also set the number of active threads to two to ensure both cores are active during testing. The results are presented in minutes/seconds for the encoding process, with lower numbers being better.


Our Plextor drive consistently took two minutes and nine seconds to read all sixteen tracks. This means our test systems are only utilizing one core during testing until the midway point of the extraction process where the drive speed exceeds the capability of the encoder and requires the use of a second thread.

As in the media encoding section, the more intensive CPU and storage system tests seem to favor the 975X over the P965/NV650i-680i/RD600 when running at the same memory timings. But once again the MSI P6N SLI Platinum board proves to be an exception to this rule at stock speeds. We ran the test several times and at one point the MSI board posted a 2 minute and 16 second result when we changed our command rate from 2T to 1T. We actually witnessed several test results where 1T performed exceptionally well but we could not get the board dual Prime95 stable with the 1.22 BIOS and 1T settings.

File Compression Performance

In order to save space on our hard drives and ensure we had another CPU crunching utility, we will be reporting our file compression results with the latest version of WinRAR that fully supports multi-threaded operations and should be of particular interest for those users with dual core or multi-processor systems. Our series of file compression tests utilizes WinRAR 3.62 to compress our test folder that contains 444 files, ten subfolders, and 602MB worth of data. All default settings are utilized in WinRAR along with our hard drive being defragmented before each test.


In a complete reversal of the other application results we see our MSI 650i board finishing last. We see the Intel P965 and 975X chipsets leading once again as both seem to thrive in this CPU intensive task. The DFI RD600 board finishes in the middle of the pack. Historically, the NV Intel chipsets have not done well in this test although they have exceptional disk performance results in our other tests. Changing our memory timings did not really affect the results and we had to increase our FSB to 272 before the NV boards scored the same as the Intel chipsets. When it comes to pure CPU crunching power, the Intel chipsets win hands down.