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Performance

All these boards ran fine during  testing, but there are some notes we'd like you to know. 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 ICH9R southbridge - under RAID mode or basically AHCI mode for single drives. For the MSI P35 Diamond, we'd include benchmarks both with the onboard audio and X-FI Xtreme audio card. Though not featured on the graph, we also include test results with ALchemy.

Our test setup
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 socket LGA-775 (running at 7 x 400 MHz)
2 x 1024 MB Kingston KHX 5-5-5-16 PC8500 DDR2-SDRAM
2 x 1024 MB Samsung 7-7-7-20 PC8500 DDR3-SDRAM
Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro 256 MB
Hitachi Deskstar 250 GB Serial ATA 16 MB buffer 7200 rpm hard drives
LiteOn 1673S DVD-RW
FSP Epsilon 800 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit with all the latest updates.
ATI Catalyst 7.9 reference driver
Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility 8.3.0.1011
Realtek Semiconductor High Definition Audio System Software Ver:R1.72
SoundMAX Audio Ver 610x6180 (for ASUS P5K Deluxe and P5K3 Deluxe)
Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi driver Ver 5.10.0.21 (for MSI P35 Diamond)
Creative ALchemy (X-Fi Edition) Web Release 1.00.7 (for MSI P35 Diamond)
DirectX 10
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

The results:

	ASUS P5K Deluxe	ASUS P5K Deluxe w SoundMAX	ASUS P5K3 Deluxe w SoundMAX	Gigabyte P35T-DQ6	Gigabyte P35-DS3P	MSI P35 Platinum	MSI P35 Diamond	MSI P35 Diamond w X-Fi	MSI P35 NeoF
1st Run
Min	49	49	49	48	49	49	49	49	49
Avg	117.96	118.59	117.49	116.32	118.05	117.33	115.85	116.2	115.63
Max	289	290	292	287	290	290	288	286	285
2nd Run
Min	48	48	48	49	48	49	48	48	48
Avg	116.64	118.53	118.06	114.41	118.06	116.41	116.45	115.66	113.33
Max	289	290	291	277	288	287	287	285	284
3rd Run
Min	48	48	48	49	47	48	48	48	48
Avg	116.88	119.31	119.35	112.05	114.69	117.02	117.26	117.21	114.89
Max	291	293	291	275	282	288	288	287	284

*numbers are in frame rates - higher is better

Well, it's pretty hard to spot any significant difference between the boards from the graph - these are averages between runs. Let's look at the table, which is more interesting. If you look closely, you'll see the difference between runs typically is about 1 fps - very small (for both minimum and average fps). Though not noticeable in real life, both Gigabyte boards - the P35T-DQ6 and P35-DS3P do have higher variations between runs - 4 fps. Its not much and small enough not to matter, but it certainly isn't the norm.

	MSI P35 Diamond	MSI P35 Diamond w X-Fi	Alchemy
1st Run
Min	49	49	49
Avg	115.85	116.2	115.95
Max	288	286	285
2nd Run
Min	48	48	48
Avg	116.45	115.66	114.26
Max	287	285	282
3nd Run
Min	48	48	48
Avg	117.26	117.21	115.47
Max	288	287	286

*numbers are in frame rates - higher is better

FEAR is one title ALchemy directly support in Vista. It's good to know that you're not only gain back EAX effects, but performance in general is better - by about 1 to 2 fps faster if you're not using ALchemy. The disadvantage of the approach is that ALchemy must explicitly have the profile for the game. Otherwise, you likely will not see any performance or quality difference at all.

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