How we test.... motherboards

Computer Shopper’s motherboard benchmarks are designed to test how well a motherboard will cope with the toughest kinds of tasks that you’re likely to throw at them.

We don’t run any office application tests, as real-world office usage will never be enough to push your motherboard to its limits. Instead, our suite of tests includes audio and video encoding, image editing and genuine games.

So that our results are as comparable as possible, all of our motherboards are tested with components as closely matched as their chipsets allow. Socket 939 motherboards are tested with an AMD Athlon 3500+ processor, and we fit socket 775 motherboards with a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 560 chip. We also test each motherboard with 1GB of DDR or DDR2 RAM, depending on which type it supports.

All results are plotted against a reference PC’s benchmark scores, so you can see immediately how they stack up against this ’average’ PC: an Evesham Athlon 3500+ system. Scores in the Computer Shopper Application Benchmarks are actual percentages of the reference performance, so a motherboard scoring 200 there is twice as fast.

TESTS

Computer Shopper application benchmarks

SETTINGS: 1,280x1,024 resolution, 32-bit colour

WHAT IT DOES: When we developed our Windows benchmarks we had two goals. First, we wanted to run really taxing scripts. Today’s motherboards have no problem running office applications such as Word and Excel, so we focussed our tests on areas where you could have difficulties.

In version 2.0 there are four scripts. Encoding a short video to MPEG2 format is an extremely processor-intensive task, and one that anyone transferring home videos to DVD will have to tackle. Our image-editing test runs a session of photo enhancement using Paint Shop Pro X, culminating with the composition of a panorama from a set of digital snaps. Next, a set of MP3s is generated by ripping a series of WAV files. Finally, we wanted to be able to test multitasking performance, which today’s dual-core processors are supposed to excel at. In our multi-task test we set the motherboard test rig compressing a DVD video file to WMV format, then our image-editing test springs to life.

Our second design goal was enhanced accuracy and reproducibility, which helps make our benchmark scores the most dependable on the newsstand.

Our suite of tests puts a motherboard through the toughest tasks that you’ll be running

PCMark04

SETTINGS: 1,280x1,024 resolution, 32-bit colour, default settings

DOWNLOAD: http://www.futuremark.com/download/?pcmark04.shtml

WHAT IT DOES: PCMark’s suite of tests analyses and tests every aspect of your motherboard’s general Windows performance. One of the main reasons that we run this benchmark is that you can download your own copy from www.futuremark.com and test your existing PC to see how it compares.

Doom 3

SETTINGS: 1,280x1,024 resolution, high quality, 4x FSAA

WHAT IT DOES: Even when motherboards are fitted with identical graphics cards, there can still be a significant difference in 3D performance. Many motherboards also have integrated graphics with 3D capability. For these reasons we run our 3D graphics test on all of our motherboards using a reference graphics card and again using the integrated graphics chipset, if the motherboard has one.

Doom 3 is one of the most visually stunning games on the market and perfect for testing graphical performance. The engine uses OpenGL, so it’s a good indication of how any game using this technology will perform.

While Doom 3 has a built-in demo, we didn’t feel this pushed graphics cards far enough, so we recorded our own demo which contains more outdoor scenes. To test a graphics card’s performance Doom 3 plays our demo back as fast as it can. The number of frames in the demo divided by the time it took to play it gives us a score in frames per second.

You can run our time demo on your home PC if you have a copy of Doom 3. In Windows Explorer open your Doom 3 directory, open the base folder and create a new folder called demos. Download our test file to this folder. Start Doom 3 and set it to the settings above and press CTRL+ALT+¬ (key to the left of ’1’). Type timedemo timedemo1 and press Return. The first test is jerky, while Doom 3 caches texture data, so run the test a second time to get the true performance figure.