EPoX EP-5LDA+GLI 945P Motherboard

How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered their system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults."  The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system.  Auto-Updating and System Restore were disabled, and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

Test System Specifications "Intel Inside!"

Preliminary Benchmarks with SiSoft SANDRA 2005 Synthetic Testing

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Cache, and Memory) with the Pentium D 820 installed into our test rig.

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

Multimedia Benchmark

CPU Cache Benchmark

Memory Benchmark

Using the SANDRA synthetic test to get an idea of the EP-5LDA+ GLI's performance compared to its peers yielded no surprises.  The board's performance was within expected ranges for all four SANDRA modules.  In the pages ahead, we'll run a number of more specific tests to get a better idea on how this product compares to similarly equipped systems.