Asus P5NSLI

Xvid Encoding:

We tested video encoding performance using VirtualDub-MPEG version 1.6.15 and a multithreaded version of the Xvid codec, along with the LAME MT MP3 encoder for encoding audio. We did a two-pass encode of a 15-minute 276MB digital TV recording with a target file size of 100MB.

Clearly, the lack of memory bandwidth has a large part to play in our video encoding scenario, as the task took an extra two minutes to complete when compared to some of the high end Core 2 ready motherboards. However, it's still faster than the equivilent AM2 nForce 570 SLI by a couple of minutes.

MP3 Encoding:

We used LAME MT for our audio encoding test - it's the multithreaded version of the popular LAME MP3 encoder. We ran tests with both Intel's and Microsoft's compilers - naturally, the Intel compiler resulted in some performance increases on Intel's processors. We converted all 18 tracks from Moby's popular Play album to a 192kbps variable bit-rate MP3.

Audio encoding didn't really suffer from the lack of memory bandwidth, probably because of the large 4MB onchip cache. It actually performs on par with the more expensive boards and is faster than MSI's K9N SLI socket AM2 mobo. The SLI overhead adds on a few seconds when decoding the MP3s to WAV files, but much like our WinRAR decompression tests, it's more dependent on hard disk write speed than out and out CPU and memory performance.