Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra: The KT400A in Retail Action

Content Creation & General Usage Performance

· Internet Content Generation: Adobe Photoshop® 6.01, Adobe Premiere® 6.0, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.1, Macromedia Dreamweaver 4, and Macromedia Flash 5

· Office Productivity: Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Microsoft Access 2002, Netscape Communicator® 6.0, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred v.5, WinZip 8.0, and McAfee VirusScan 5.13.

For more information on the methodology and exactly what SYSMark does to generate these performance scores check out BAPCo's SYSMark 2002 Whitepaper.

Content Creation Performance Internet Content Creation SYSMark 2002 ASUS A7N8X Deluxe (nForce2-Dual Channel DDR333) ASUS A7N8X Deluxe (nForce2-Single Channel DDR333) Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra (KT400A-Single Channel DDR400) Gigabyte 7VAXP Ultra (KT400-Single Channel DDR400) 283 281 278 265 | 0 | 57 | 113 | 170 | 226 | 283 | 340

 

General Usage Performance Office Productivity SYSMark 2002 ASUS A7N8X Deluxe (nForce2-Dual Channel DDR333) ASUS A7N8X Deluxe (nForce2-Single Channel DDR333) Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra (KT400A-Single Channel DDR400) Gigabyte 7VAXP Ultra (KT400-Single Channel DDR400) 213 210 202 182 | 0 | 42 | 84 | 126 | 168 | 210 | 252

Even double the bandwidth has very little affect on the nForce2's performance in this benchmark, as office programs usually require very little bandwidth to begin with. Here the A7N8X Deluxe takes just a 1.4% hit going from dual to single channel mode. The 7VAXP-A Ultra stays very close to both single and dual channel modes, trailing by no more than 1.8%. The KT400-based 7VAXP Ultra lags noticably behind our nForce2 and KT400A motherboards, as high as 14.6% in fact. Though, it's certainly nice to see that the KT400A shows such a vast improvement in office performance over it's older KT400 brother.

Video Encoding Performance

MPEG-4 Encoding Performance MPEG-2 to DiVX Conversion using XMpeg 4.5 & DiVX 5.0.2 (Frames per Second - Higher is Better) ASUS A7N8X Deluxe (nForce2-Dual Channel DDR333) ASUS A7N8X Deluxe (nForce2-Single Channel DDR333) Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra (KT400A-Single Channel DDR400) Gigabyte 7VAXP Ultra (KT400-Single Channel DDR400) 56.8 53.6 51.7 50.8 | 0 | 11 | 22 | 33 | 44 | 55 | 66

Going from single to dual channel mode, we see a 3.2 fps (Frames per Second) difference in video encoding performance. The 7VAXP-A Ultra is a full 5.1 fps (or 9%) behind the A7N8X Deluxe's dual channel mode. It's no secret that video encoding applications are bandwidth hungry, so these results aren't surprising at all.