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Performance

All these boards ran fine during  testing, but there are some notes we'd like you to know. First is the noise distortion on the ASUS P5B Deluxe. The second and by far the most annoying is the inability to enable DMA Transfer on the MSI P965 Platinum for our Liteon DVD-RW drive. These two boards also exhbit some rather interesting clock behaviours.

The settings we used for this round up are limited to just 1024 x 768, 32 bit with without AA and AF. These settings were chosen so that the graphics card performance is not a factor. Any performance difference will likely be caused by other factors, more likely related to processor and memory subsystems (clock, timing). Storrage and audio may also play a factor here.  All of these boards are tested with the default SATA controller on Intel's ICH8R southbridge. Any other variations will likely be caused by the different use of audio codecs. The ASUS P5B Deluxe relies on Analog Devices ADI1988 chip while the Gigabyte P965-DQ6 rely on Realtek ALC888DD chip and the P965-DS3 and MSI P965 Platinum used the ALC883 chip.

Our test setup
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 socket LGA-775
2 x 512 MB A-DATA 5-5-5-18 PC6400 DDR2-SDRAM
Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro 256 MB
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
LiteOn 1673S DVD-RW
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 6.11 reference driver
Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility 8.1.0.1006
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

The results:

For all intent and purposes, these boards offer basically the same performance. The difference between the results are well below 1 percent, which is most likely just normal variations between runs. The same applies to both average and minimum frame rates. Of course, Call of Duty is a very old game, unable to really tax the Core 2 Duo processor or even make effective use of the second core in this dual core processor.


Homeworld 2 have always been system limited, even with our old setup - the the single core Athlon 64 3500+. The situation here is practically the same situation as we saw earlier with Call of Duty. It's also quite an old game. Any variations present in the results are likely caused by normal variations between runs.


A slightly different picture and very interesting to discuss. Relatively constant from one run to the next, the results after repeated runs shows that the ASUS P5B Deluxe is definitely slower than the other boards. The main culprit seems to be sound - the ASUS P5B Deluxe uses the Analog Devices codec instead of the Realtek codec in the other three boards. The high number of voices used in this game caused slightly lower frame rates for the ASUS P5B Deluxe. Though the difference is somewhat significant, frame rates are high enough for that not to matter much.

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