www.nickhodge.com

After the des­per­ate fail of the Giga­byte mother­board with the Phe­nom pro­cessor last week: I indulged my mother­board addic­tion, took Michael Kleef’s valu­able advice and pur­chased an ASUS.

Spe­cific­ally, the ASUS M2A-VM HDMI board. Installed, upgraded the BIOS and it worked. Booted first time. In fact, a few driver installs later and the machine is working.

Per­form­ance change: As this machine is primar­ily a video cap­ture and encoder machine, transcod­ing is an excel­lent meas­ure­ment of per­form­ance change.I have a stand­ard 5Gb video that I transcode using Microsoft Expres­sion Encoder with a com­mon out­put setting.

ASUS M2A-VM AMD Ath­lon 6000+ : 17m27s

ASUS M2A-VM AMD Phe­nom 9600 BE : 14m09s

This is a 18.9% improve­ment in performance.

The Win­dows Pro­cessor per­form­ance on the Pro­cessor changed from 5.4 to 5.9 (as you would expect)

Now to recon­fig­ure the drivers for the digital video capture.