Testbed and Methods
Since Asus P5E mainboard is based on the new Intel X38 chipset it is especially interesting to check out its performance side by side with that of Intel P35 based solutions available in the today’s market. However, Intel didn’t promise that the new top core logic set will have any additional memory controller optimizations, so we didn’t actually expect the tests to reveal anything outstanding.
We decided to compare the performance of our Asus P5E mainboard against that of a popular Asus P5K Premium based on Intel P35 chipset. Just like our today’ main hero, this board also works with DDR2 SDRAM. The testbeds were built with the following equipment:
- Intel Core 2 Extreme 6850 CPU ((LGA775, 3.0GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 8MB L2, Kentsfield).
- Mainboards:
- ASUS P5E (LGA775, Intel X38, DDR2 SDRAM)
- ASUS P5K Premium (LGA775, Intel P35, DDR2 SDRAM).
- Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-8888C4DF memory.
- OCZ GeForce 8800GTX (PCI-E x16) graphics card.
- Western Digital WD1500AHFD HDD (SATA150).
- Microsoft Windows Vista x86 OS.
Performance in Nominal Mode
The first series of tests were performed with the processor working at its default speed of 3.0GHz set as 9 x 333MHz. The memory frequency in this case was set at 1066MHz with 4-4-4-12 timings.
As usual, we will first check out synthetic benchmarks testing the memory subsystem performance. This parameter is crucial for the performance of mainboards for Intel processors. For our tests we used Lavalys Everest 4.20 utility.
In synthetic tests Asus P5E memory controller is a little bit more efficient than Asus P5K memory controller.
But before we make any conclusions let’s check out the situation in complex benchmarks and real applications.
The results of application tests prove the conclusions you may have made after checking out the Everest results. Asus P5E is a slightly faster mainboard, at least in nominal mode. The average performance advantage over the Asus P5K Premium is about 1.3%.
