Review: ASUSTeK P5W DH i975X mainboard

by HEXUS Staff on 14 August 2006, 08:46

Tags: ASUSTeK P5W DH, ASUSTeK (TPE:2357)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qagi3

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System setup and notes


ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe
Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6
ATI Sturgeon System
Processor
Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, LGA775)
AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8GHz, 2MiB L2 cache, AM2)
Motherboard
ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe
Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6
ATI Sturgeon Reference - (Xpress 3200 CrossFire)
Memory
2GiB (2 x 1024) Corsair XMS2 PC8500 EPP
Memory Timings
4-4-4-12-2T @ 800MHz
Graphics card(s)
Sapphire Radeon X1900 XTX 512MiB
Disk drive(s)
Seagate 160GB 7200.9 SATA 3Gbps
BIOS revision
0602 (06/30/2006)
D23 (15/06/06)
08.00.13
Mainboard software
Intel Inf Update 8.00.1009
SATA(AHCI): 2.5.1540.25
IDE: 1.00.0000.3
CHIPSET: 5.10.1000.5
Graphics driver
ATI Catalyst 6.6 BETA
Opperating system
Windows XP Pro SP2 32-bit

Testing software

As we are drawing direct comparisons from the systems above, the same testing software will be used.

  • ScienceMark Memory Bandwidth
  • ScienceMark Memory Latency
  • Pifast calculation to 10M places
  • KribiBench
  • HEXUS WAV encoding
  • HEXUS DivX encoding
  • Cinebench 2003
  • HDTach 3.0.1.0

The same goes for our 3D testing procedure.

  • Far Cry v1.33
  • Quake 4 v1.04
  • Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05

Our recently reviewed Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 is ideal to run a comparison against. Just for good measure, we'll see how it fairs against the AM2-based ATI Sturgeon System.

As you may remember from our Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 review, that board had a slightly faster FSB than was selected. The ASUS board also has the same issue. With the FSB clocked in at 267.1MHz, it makes the CPU run at 2938MHz. While it's only 10MHz difference, it's worth keeping in mind that it could be the cause of any small increases in Gigabyte's favour. Just to recap:

2948.0MHz - 268.0MHz FSB - Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 - Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU
2938.1MHz - 267.1MHz FSB - ASUS P5W DH Deluxe - Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU
2813.0MHz - 200.9MHz FSB - ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 - AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 AM2

On with the testing!