Test results: 2D applications

We start our testing course with Cinebench 9.5. This is a 3D graphics render application which uses the CPU power.



The Intel chipset based ASUS P5E gives the MSI board quite a challenge, no wonder since the ASUS board comes with Intel's high-end chipset X38. Stock as well as with the system overclocked we could measure the MSI board fallen slightly behind, but the gap is close to negligible in real life.



Futuremark's 3D Mark 2006 software also features build-in CPU rendering tests that are combined with a decent score calculating system. Because a score is being used as results, it doesn't really say how well a certain application will work in real life, though the positive side is that we have a higher detailed compare. On stock clocks our MSI board falls slightly behind but the difference get smaller once the host clock is being ramped up.



SuperPi 1M is one of the most popular 2D benchmarks mostly because it is very easy in use and takes up less then a minute to run through (On an Intel Core 2 system). Though being a single threaded application it is less useful to test dual core systems, but for today's pc it still can put quite some stress on the CPU, DRAM and MCH. Just like with the CPU rendering tests from above both boards remain very on par here, stock the ASUS board is only a little bit faster then MSI's offering, but once again when the system is overclocked the NVIDIA chipset is able to produce on par performance then the Intel X38 chipset.



In the longer SuperPi calculations it becomes clear that the ASUS X38 is quite a bit faster then the 750i, with a difference of up to 4s it is roughly 3% faster at stock performance, but the gap widens when the host clock is being set to 400MHz, then the MSI board is fall further back to being around 6% slower.



Another well-know benchmarking tool is Wprime, in here it is for the first time that we see the MSI board come at as best, but with a close to zero lead you can say they both perform just about on par here.



SiSoftware has made a long journey already in pc-land, we tested their latest Sandra applications for Windows PC's: SiSoft Sandra Lite 2007. Inside we can find multiple in-depth tests for almost every main pc component; we chose to run through the CPU MULTIMEDIA and MEMORY BANDWIDTH benchmark. The above chart we can see the Multimedia score of both Intel systems, yet again performance is very on par between each different chipset, with the X38 board from ASUS just slightly in head.



The memory bandwidth test in turn puts the MSI board much in front of the ASUS board. We saw this with the 650i chipset and now history is simply repeating. At stock speed the difference is acceptable, but once the system is being booted at 400MHz Front Side Bus the 750i seem to handle the memory much better resulting into a clean victory with more than 600mb/s compared to the X38.



Driverheaven has been promoting their Photoshop benchmark for quite some time as being a fun alternative for SuperPi, PiFast and other 2D benchmark software. In this test we open a high-res picture in Adobe Photoshop and run it through multiple digital manipulation effects, by using the build-in timer we can use this batch of tests as a trustable system benchmark. Although mostly being a CPU benchmark it seems that the memory subsystem is also stressed quite a bit, looking at our chart we can clearly see how MSI's board takes the lead here once again, at higher clock rates the difference is slightly smaller.

More performance charts on next page where we take our systems through some 3D benchmarks. ->