Science Mark 2.0 is an attempt to put the truth behind benchmarking. In an attempt to model real world demands and performance, SM2 is a suite of high-performance benchmarks that realistically stress system performance without architectural bias.  Science Mark 2.0 is comprised of 7 benchmarks, each of which measures a different aspect of real world system performance.

Pov-Ray s a high-quality, totally free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics. It is available in official versions for Windows, Mac OS/Mac OS X and i86 Linux. The source code is available for those wanting to do their own ports. We used Pov-Ray 3.7beta15 for all tests, since it supports Dual Core CPUs. We used the built-in benchmark as suggested by the developers.

DDR2 Memory Motherboards

In the PovRay benchmark, the Gigabyte P35-DQ6 got the highest score, while in ScienceMark, the Asus P5K Premium produced the highest rendering speed.

DDR3 Memory Motherboards

Passing to the DDR3 platform, we see that the Asus Blitz Extreme gains the highest scores in both tests.

- x264 Benchmark

x264 Benchmark leads the next generation of Video Encoding benchmarks with support for the x264 codec, that is considered to be one of the most demanding for Video applications. Simply put, this test measures how fast your machine can encode a short, DVD quality MPEG-2 video clip into a high-quality x264 video clip. The author believes that "...it's ideal for a benchmark because the application (x264.exe) reports fairly accurate compression results (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encoding process, and it uses multi-core processors very efficiently..."

The benchmark procedure is very simple, you just run a batch file that encodes the same file five times. There are two kinds of results, for first pass and second. We summed and divided the results in order to get an average performance and we post the results below.

DDR2 Memory Motherboards

The difference in performance from the tested motherboards seems to be very slight.

DDR3 Memory Motherboards

Again, the performance differences are not so great...