Value Dual Socket-370 Motherboard Roundup - August 2001

Synthetic Test - CliBench Mk III SMP 0.7.10 (CPU Tests)

The above table gives the results of some very CPU intensive tests. Since we used two CPUs for all testing, it's a very good indication of how good the SMP implementation is on each motherboard. Once again, the Iwill DVD266-R clinch the top spot, where it edges out all other competitors in every category except the Matrix test.

The Acorp 6A815EPD fluctuates between tests, where it scored very high in the Matrix test but very poorly under the Eight Queens test. Besides that, all other boards perform very similarly, showing that SMP has been implemented properly on all motherboards.

Synthetic Test - CliBench Mk III SMP 0.7.10 (Memory and I/O Tests)

The second set of CliBench tests involve memory throughput and I/O performance. On the memory side, the Iwill DVD266-R outperforms all other boards by a big margin easily, not a surprise since it uses DDR memory technology while all other boards are still using SDR SDRAM.

VIA has been criticized for their poor memory performance, and we once again see that here since among the SDR boards, the Acorp 6A815EPD scores much higher. Among Apollo Pro133A boards, the ASUS CUV4X-DLS jumps out a bit, mainly because of its extensive memory tweaking options, while the ECS D6VAA falls behind in memory performance by quite a bit.

Disk I/O performance is relatively uniform across the board, which isn't a surprise because these tests are usually far more disk limited than controller limited.