The new PCMark Vantage program simulates the use of real-world applications and gives scores for the following categories:

• PCMark
• Memories
• TV and Movies
• Gaming
• Music
• Communications
• Productivity
• HDD

For a detailed description of each one of these tests, please download and read the PCMark Vantage Reviewer’s Guide.

You can see the results for each category below. We are not going to compare the results for the Memories and HDD suites.

This benchmarking was done using the motherboard on-board video. Usually the motherboard with the fastest graphics engine achieves the highest score on this program. See the results below.

The only test where the two motherboards achieved a similar performance was on the Communications batch, and the only test where ECS GF8200A was faster than Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G was on the Productivity batch, where ECS GF8200A Black Series achieved a score 3.84% higher than the reviewed board.

On all other batches Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G was faster than ECS GF8200A, maybe showing us that AMD 780G chipset is faster than nVidia GeForce 8200 (we will need to see the results from the other tests to confirm this). Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G achieved a PCMark score 11.57% higher, a TV and Movies score 7.92% higher, a Gaming score 18.90% higher and a Music score 6.05% higher than ECS GF8200A.