Soltek SL-865Pro-775 (Hybrid) 'ProSeries' Motherboard Review

Serious Sam is a great FPS game that brings back many things that made FPS fun, TONS of things to shoot!! Even with conservative settings this game will tax even the fastest of computers.

I used the default fresh installed settings for this benchmark. If you'd like to do your own Serious Sam demo benchmark bring down the console and type "dem_bProfile=1" (w/out quotes), exit the console then choose a demo from the main menu. When the demo is complete pull down the console again to see your score.

Serious Sam: Second Encounter.

Unreal Tournament 2004. For this benchmark we used a multi-player demo called Primeval. If you wish to try the demo out for yourself it can be downloaded from the following website or ask me and I'll send you a copy. The timedemo is similar to the one used in Quake III in that once the demo is over you pull down the console to see the average FPS.

XviD Movie Encoding Test: This is a new test that was added to cover other sections of real-world performance. The test consists of a simple task of encoding a DVD rip from VOB to AVI with AutoGK 1.25 using the XviD codec. The movie used is the first chapter of Dirty Pair Flash #2 and consisted of 40104 frames. The time shown is how many frames per second were processed during the first pass to encode the video files.

The best of the best when it comes to real world benchmarks, this free program is available from eTesting Labs and uses real programs to test the overall performance of your computer. These programs include: Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1, Adobe Premiere 6.50, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980, NewTek's LightWave 3D 7.5b, and Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f.

Business Winstone is quite similar to the Content Creation benchmark but uses programs that you would most likely use in the office. These programs include Microsoft Access 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Excel 2002 SP-2, Microsoft FrontPage 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Outlook 2002 SP-2, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Project 2002, Microsoft Word 2002 SP-2, WinZip 8.1 SR-1, and Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003.

The real-world conclusions show exactly what I had expected to see, the Soltek SL-865Pro-775 pulled ahead in just about every test that was more dependant of CPU and memory performance though started to fall behind in multimedia applications. This loss of performance is minor at best and typical of this particular mismatch in hardware spec.