Processor: AMD Athlon 4850e (Supplied by AMD) Motherboard: ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI (Supplied by ASUS) Memory: 2x 1GB DDR2-6400 Corsair (Supplied by AMD) Hard Disk: 1TB Western Digital Caviar GP (Supplied by GAP Marketing) Graphics Card: IGP and HIS HD3450 (Supplied by MSI) Cooling: OCZ Vanquisher (Supplied by OCZ Technology) Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista Drivers: ATI Beta Vista Drivers 8.47
Our test system today is simply the HTPC. We won’t be doing any tests other than that of the HTPC itself. We will be using both the IGP on its own, discrete graphics and then with Hybrid Crossfire. We will also be doing power usage tests along with our usual tests.
EVEREST Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems.
With the onboard graphics enabled, the overall memory score takes a hit because some of the memory and bandwidth are allocated to the IGP. With the discrete only enabled, we see the memory pick back up. With Hybrid Crossfire we see memory take a hit again once again; this is one of the disadvantages of Hybrid Graphics, you get the extra power of the external GPU, but the IGP still sucks system memory.
