System setup and notes
Hardware
| Motherboards | MSI P35 Platinum | ASUS P5K Deluxe WiFi | ASUS P5K3 Deluxe WiFi | Foxconn 975X7AB | EVGA nForce 680i LT | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chipsets | P35 + ICH9R | i975X + ICH7R | nForce 680i LT SPP + 570 SLI MCP | |||||
| Processor | Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, LGA775) | |||||||
| Memory | 2GiB (2 x 1024) Corsair EPP | 2GiB (2 x 1024) Corsair TWIN3X2048-1066C7 | 2GiB (2 x 1024) Corsair EPP | |||||
| Memory timings and speed | 4-4-4-12 2T @ 800MHz (PC6400) | 7-7-7-21 2T @ 1066MHz (PC8528) | 4-4-4-12 2T @ 800MHz (PC6400) | |||||
| Graphics card(s) | HIS X1900 CrossFire + Sapphire X1900 XTX | Dual ASUS GeForce 7900 GTXs in SLI | ||||||
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GB SATAII (ST3160812AS) | |||||||
| Optical drive(s) | Sony DW-Q30A | |||||||
| BIOS revision | 1.2B1 (05/22/2007)) | 0201 (04/23/2007) | 0301 (04/23/2007) | 635F1D08 (09/08/2006) | 721N0P01 (02/22/2007) | |||
| Mainboard software | Intel Inf Update 8.3.0.1013 | Intel Inf Update 8.1.1.1010 | NVIDIA platform driver 9.53 | |||||
| Graphics driver | ATI CATALYST 6.10 Beta (7.5 Beta for CrossFire) | NVIDIA ForceWare 91.47 | ||||||
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, w/ SP2, 32-bit | |||||||
| PSU | OCZ GameXstream 700W | |||||||
| Monitor | Dell 2405FPW | |||||||
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 WAV encoding HEXUS DivX encoding POV-Ray 32-bit 3.7.0 BETA 16 - Use internal benchmark mode - biscuit.pov CINEBENCH 2003 v9.5 HDTach RW v3.0.1.0 |
|---|
| 3D Benchmarks |
Far Cry v1.33 Quake 4 v1.30 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 |
|---|
Observational notes
The pre-production sample suffered from a couple of minor BIOS-related problems that should be fixed on full-retail examples. The board passed a 7-hour burn-in test that comprised of running Prime95 torture test with 3DMark05 looping in CrossFire mode.We're comparing the P35 Platinum's performance against a couple of ASUS P35 boards, P5K Deluxe WiFi and P5K3 Deluxe WiFi, which utilise DDR2 and DDR3 memories, respectively.
Further, a Foxconn i975X motherboard and EVGA nForce 680i LT were added to show comparative performance from other chipsets.
The P5K3 Deluxe was run with DDR3-1066 memory operating at 7-7-7-21 latencies whilst all other boards ran DDR2 at 800MHz with 4-4-4-12 timings.
Benchmark results from chipsets based around the same processor and supporting components tend to be almost identical. That's why we pay attention to the actual speed that the boards run the Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor at, to see if anyone's gaining an artificially-induced advantage by sneakily increasing their board's FSB.
2940.3MHz - 267.3MHz FSB - Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 - ASUS P5K3 Deluxe WiFi
2940.3MHz - 267.3MHz FSB - Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 - ASUS P5K Deluxe WiFi
2936.1MHz - 266.9Hz FSB - Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 - MSI P35 Platinum
2933.1MHz - 266.6MHz FSB - Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 - EVGA nForce 680i LT SLI
2928.4MHz - 266.2MHz FSB - Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 - Foxconn 975X7AB - i975X
There's nothing much in it, really, as there's a <0.5 per cent delta between the various boards' clockspeeds.
As always, we ran each benchmark a trio of times and then calculated the arithmetic mean. If any of the three results looked erroneous, we threw all three away until we could collect three within a margin of statistical error. We report any major attempts needed to get three reliable results, of course. Apart from that, things are as noted on the graphs and in the graph commentary.