Battle of the SiS 648 Budgets - MSI vs. Gigabyte vs. ECS

Benchmarks

Test System

Processor: Intel Pentium 4 2.4B GHz (Northwood) (Supplied by Spectrum Communications)

Memory: 2x 256MB DDR-400 Kingmax (512MB) (Supplied by Kingmax)

Video Card: NVIDIA Reference GF4 Ti4200 128MB (Supplied by NVIDIA)

Hard Disk: Western Digital WD1200 (Supplied by Achieva)

Drivers: NVIDIA DetXP rev 40.41

Software Used: Sisoft Sandra 2002, 3DMark2001, PCMark 2002 Pro, Sysmark 2002, Vulpine GLmark, Quake 3 Arena, Aquanox, DroneZmark, Max Payne, Star Trek Voyager Elite Force, Jedi Knight II

SiSoft Sandra 2002 SP1

SiSoft Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) 2002 is a synthetic Windows benchmark that features different tests used to evaluate different PC subsystems. We used this to test CPU Raw Performance, Multimedia Instruction Set and Memory Bandwidth Performance. While they are all synthetic results, they do give us a general idea of what is happening and where a component's strengths and weaknesses are.

ECS leads out over all the other budget boards in the memory tests while being almost identical in the CPU tests.