µATX Part 1: ATI Radeon Xpress 1250 Performance Review

Media Performance

We will take a brief look at general media performance with our test suite that includes Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0.

We utilize the PC WorldBench 6.0 Test for measuring platform performance in Adobe's Photoshop CS2. The benchmark applies an extensive number of filters to the test image and heavily stresses the CPU and storage systems. The scores reported include the full conversion process and are represented in seconds, with lower numbers indicating better performance.


The results are interesting as this test requires a balance between CPU speed and a fast storage sub-system. Based on overall test results we believe the difference in the scores are related to the storage sub-systems as the Intel ICH9 generally scores better in our hard disk specific tests. We also see the same pattern when comparing the two X1250 based boards as the ASRock consistently scores better than the abit in disk intensive tests. The MSI G33M is 13% faster than the abit board and 6% quicker than the ASRock board.

Our next test is one recommended by Intel, but the test itself appears to be fair and results are very repeatable. This test simply measures the amount of time required to fix and optimize 103 different photos weighing in at 63MB. Time is measured in seconds, with lower times resulting in better performance


This test heavily stresses the CPU but also requires a decent storage system. Our ASRock and MSI platforms barely edges out the abit in a test where sheer CPU speed is extremely important.

File Compression Performance

In order to save space on our hard drives and ensure we had another CPU crunching utility, we will be reporting our file compression results with the latest version of WinRAR that fully supports multithreaded operations and should be of particular interest for those users with dual core or multi-processor systems. Our series of file compression tests utilizes WinRAR 3.62 to compress our test folder that contains 444 files, ten subfolders, and 602MB worth of data. All default settings are utilized in WinRAR along with our hard drive being defragmented before each test.


Once again we see the X1250 performing well in a test that stresses overall memory latencies and CPU/Memory throughput. The nature of file compression is such that memory is accessed almost constantly in a very random fashion, so page misses requiring additional time as memory banks are swapped is common. The ASRock board is 5% quicker than the MSI G33M and about 4% faster than the abit board.