System Setup and Notes
We benchmark the P965 Premium against the Intel D975XBX 'Bad Axe' and the Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 to see the performance it turns in versus high-end i975X and a direct competitor. When we reviewed the DQ6 (such a snappy name) we found that it matches i975X easily and often outperforms it. If the P965 Platinum isn't broken it should do the same. Here's the setup notes.Hardware
| System | MSI P965 Platinum System | Intel D975XBX Bad Axe System | Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 System |
|---|---|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 (2.93GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, LGA775) | ||
| Motherboard | MSI P965 Platinum System | Intel D975XBX Bad Axe rev. 304 | Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 System |
| Memory | 2GiB (2 x 1024) Corsair PC8500 | ||
| Memory timings and speed | 4-4-4-12 2T @ 800MHz (PC6400) | ||
| Graphics card(s) | ATI Radeon X1900 XTX 512MiB | ||
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GB 7200.9 SATA 3Gbps | ||
| BIOS revision | (13/06/06) | 1304 (20/06/06) | D23 (15/06/06) |
| Mainboard software | Intel Inf Update 8.0.0.1009 | ||
| Graphics driver | CATALYST 6.8 | ||
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, w/ SP2, 32-bit | ||
Software
We ran the mainboards through our usual array of benchmarks.| 2D Benchmarks |
ScienceMark Memory Bandwidth ScienceMark Memory Latency HEXUS Pifast calculation to 10M places HEXUS Cryptography Realstorm Raytracing 2004 KribiBench v1.1 HEXUS WAV encoding HEXUS DivX encoding Cinebench 2003 v9.5 |
|---|
| 3D Benchmarks |
Far Cry v1.33 Quake 4 v1.04 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Futuremark 3DMark05 b1.2.0 |
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Notes
The MSI P965 Platinum ran the CPU at 11 x 267.0MHz, for just few MHz higher than it should (2937MHz). The Gigabyte ran the CPU at 2948MHz, while the Bad Axe ran things spot on at 2933MHz.The usual bits apply here. We ran each benchmark a trio of times, discarding the outer results and reporting the middle one. If any of the three results looked erroneous, we threw all three away until we could collect three within a margin of statistical error. Any major attempts needed to get three reliable results we let you know about, of course. Apart from that, things are as noted on the graphs and in the graph commentary. Want to know more? Hit up the fantastic, awesome, entirely gorgeous HEXUS.community. You know it makes sense, etc, etc.