Home Theatre PC Motherboard Shootout

Test Setup:

As always, we did our best to deliver a clean set of benchmarks, with each test repeated three times and an average of those results is what we’re reporting here. In the rare case where performance was inconsistent, we continued repeating the test until we got three results that were consistent.

Motherboards:

• Asus P5E-VM HDMI
  
• Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H
  
• MSI K9AGM3-FIH

Common Components:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E4300
  
• AMD Athlon 64 5000+ 65nm Black Edition
  
• 2GB DDR2 800MHz at 5-5-5-18-2T timings (SDP)
  
• PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750W PSU
  
• Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
  
• Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit

Drivers

• Nvidia Forceware 169.25
  
• Intel IGP Drivers 15.7.3
  
• AMD Catalyst 7.11

The AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Energy Efficient has been one of our CPUs of choice for a while – at 2.6GHz, it has enough horsepower to cope with many things, and it's also built on AMD's 65nm SOI process so it's far lower power than other dual-core CPUs that AMD sells. It retails for about £65 which is close to the Intel E4500 which retails for about £76.


Alternatively there's the E2200 CPU for £57 – the difference is merely 2MB versus 1MB of L2 cache and the same clock speed. Don't be put off by the "Pentium" nomenclature of the E2200 because it's still a Core 2 Duo part architecturally. We used an E4300 when testing the Intel boards, and at 1.80GHz with 2MB of cache and an 800MHz FSB, it fits between both these CPUs.

The memory was left at SPD settings at 800MHz to represent the performance of 2GB value branded memory, which can be bought for as little as £31 now.

Overall this gives us a top to bottom pricing structure of £165 for the Asus P5E-VM HDMI and Intel Core 2 Duo E4500, £123 for the Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H and Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 and finally £105 for an MSI K9AGM3-FIH and an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Energy Efficient 5000+. Simply put, does paying more give you better performance and a better experience?