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TEST METHODOLOGY
Test Setup:
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System device listing.
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Measurement and Analysis Tools
Our main test procedure is designed to determine the overall system power consumption
at various states (measured using a Seasonic Power Angel). We stress the CPU
using CPUBurn (K7 or P6 setting) or Prime95 (large FFTs setting). To stress
the IGP, we use FurMark's stability test or ATITool's artifact scanner/3DView.
We use which ever CPU/GPU stress software/setting that produces the highest
system power consumption.
We also test platform's proficiency at playing back high definition videos.
Standard Blu-ray movies, by design, can be encoded in three different codecs:
MPEG-2, H.264/AVC and VC-1. MPEG-2 has been around for a number of years and
is not demanding on modern system resources. H.264 and VC-1 encoded videos on
the other hand, due to the amount of complexity in their compression schemes,
are extremely stressful and will not play smoothly (or at all) on slower PCs,
especially with antiquated video subsystems.
Our main video test suite features a variety of 1080p H.264/VC-1 encoded clips.
The clips are played with PowerDVD and a CPU usage graph is created by the Windows
Task Manger for analysis to determine the approximate mean CPU usage. High CPU
usage is indicative of poor video decoding ability on the part of the integrated
graphics subsystem. If the video (and/or audio) skips or freezes, we conclude
the board's IGP (in conjunction with the processor) is inadequate to decompress
the clip properly.
SpeedStep was enabled during testing (unless otherwise noted).
The following features/services were disabled during testing to prevent spikes
in CPU/HDD usage that are typical of fresh Vista installations:
- Windows Sidebar
- Indexing
- Superfetch
Video Test Suite
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