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| Introduction and the Board |
As we've mentioned, the P45 chipset is manufactured using Intel's 65nm process node. The chipset can support either DDR2 or DDr memory technologies and 800MHz - 1.33GHz Front Side Bus frequencies, although a 1.6GHz FSB will be unofficially supported by many P45 motherboards. DDR3 memory speeds of up to DDR3-1333 and DDR2 speed of up to DDR2-1066 are officially supported, but once again, higher speeds are attainable through overclocking. The ICH10 southbridge supports 6 SATA ports, 12 USB 2.0 ports, HD audio, and Intel 82567 Gigabit LAN. The Asus P5Q Deluxe, however, features the ICH10R, which also adds support for Intel Matrix RAID storage technology. Notice, there is no legacy PATA or LPT support here. |
| The BIOS and Overclocking | ||||
Like a number of previous Asus high-end motherboard offerings, the P45-based P5Q Deluxe is outfitted with an embedded Linux-based operating system that’s available upon initial power-up. The feature is dubbed “Express Gate”, but it is based on the SplashTop platform technology developed by San Jose-based company DeviceVM. With this new motherboard, however, the Express Gate OS has been updated to v1.1.1.22 and offers a couple of new applications.
If, for example, you need to download a driver or BIOS file and the hard drive-based OS isn’t functioning properly. With Express Gate you can access the web and integrated peripherals even if the system’s full blown OS has a problem and won't boot.
The Asus P5Q Deluxe's standard BIOS menu screens don't reveal anything unusual, but they will give you a feel for the general layout and organization of the options. Each individual screen has a host of menus that tunnel deeper and deeper as the options get more complex. As we've seen with most of Asus' recent motherboard offerings, other than the color scheme used, the P5Q Deluxe's menus are very similar to the BIOS derivatives used on most other high-end motherboards today.
It is inside the "Extreme Tweaker" section of the Asus P5Q Deluxe's BIOS that users will find most of the board's performance tuning options. From within the "Extreme Tweaker" section of the BIOS, users have the ability to alter clock frequencies and voltages for every major on-board component. The CPU front side bus and PCI Express frequencies can be altered in 1MHz increments, and the CPU multiplier and memory ratio can also be manipulated manually. There are also extensive voltage options for the CPU, Memory, chipset, CPU PLL, CPU GTL (reference 0/2 and 1/3), FSB termination, Southbridge and SATA. Another useful feature is that the BIOS is designed to allow users to key in voltages and frequencies directly without having to tunnel into a menu option. We found this type of interface easy to use and especially liked the notes in the right margin that explained what each setting did, and which values were recommended. We should note, that while the Asus P5Q Deluxe does have an wide assortment of voltage and memory options geared for overclockers, tinkering with all of them is not necessarily required to achieve high FSB and memory frequencies. Asus actually includes a feature called "Mem OC Charger" that acts as a signal quality compensation mechanism to help system memory to reach higher frequencies. Asus also states that due to the P45's 65nm manufacturing process, high NB voltages aren't necessary for moderate overclocking. Obviously, we spent some time overclocking with the Asus P5Q Deluxe to see just how much untapped horsepower it had left. We began by increasing our processor's core and the memory voltages by .1v. Then we dropped our processor's multiplier to 6x, initially lowered the memory speed, and increased the front side bus frequency until our test system was no longer stable. In the end, we were able to increase the FSB to 500MHz and memory to almost 1.2GHz with stock cooling and only a couple of minor tweaks. Anything higher than 500MHz and the system wasn't stable with the stock chipset, FSB, and PLL voltages. We're sure higher frequencies are possible though, with more experimentation though. |
| Test Systems and SANDRA XII | |||||||||||||||||
How We Configured Our Test Systems: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for either DDR2-1066 with 5,5,5,15 timings or DDR3-1333 with 7,7,7,20 timings. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
The SiSoft SANDRA benchmarks tell an interesting story. According the three modules we ran, the P45 and X48 chipset perform similar in the CPU Arithmetic benchmark, which is to be expected. The memory bandwidth and latency benchmarks, however, show marked differences between the two chipsets. Although they were both equipped with the same CPU and memory, the X48 / DDR2 combination put up slightly better memory bandwidth and latency scores. Whereas the P45-based Asus P5Q Deluxe offered up approximately 6.98GB/s of memory bandwidth with a random access latency of 77ns, the X48-based Gigabyte board put up 7.01GB/s of peak bandwidth with random access latency of 73ns. How these differences play out in real world performance scenarios, however, remains to be seen. |
| PCMark Vantage | ||||
We ran the Asus P5Q Deluxe, as well as a trio of competing platforms, through Futuremark’s latest system performance metric built especially for Windows Vista, PCMark Vantage. PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads, including High Definition TV and movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity. Most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, so the tests can exploit the additional resources offered by a quad-core CPU.
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| LAME MT and Kribibench v1.1 | ||||||||
In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format, which is a popular scenario that many end users work with on a day-to-day basis to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. LAME is an open-source mid to high bit-rate and VBR (variable bit rate) MP3 audio encoder that is used widely around the world in a multitude of third party applications.
In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file (a hallucinogenically-induced Grateful Dead jam) and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT application in single and multi-thread modes. Processing times are recorded below, listed in seconds. Once again, shorter times equate to better performance.
For this next batch of tests, we ran Kribibench v1.1, a 3D rendering benchmark produced by the folks at Adept Development. Kribibench is an SSE aware software renderer where a 3D model is rendered and animated by the host CPU and the average frame rate is reported. We used two of the included models with this benchmark: a "Sponge Explode" model consisting of over 19.2 million polygons and the test suite's "Ultra" model that is comprised of over 16 billion polys. |
| Cinebench R10 and 3DMark06 | ||||||||
Cinebench R10 is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D. Cinema 4D from Maxon is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by 3D animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput.
This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene and tracks performance through the entire process. The overall scores put up by each system in the single and multi-threaded tests are represented in the graph below.
3DMark06's built-in CPU test is a multi-threaded DirectX gaming metric that's useful for comparing relative performance between similarly equipped systems. This test consists of two different 3D scenes that are processed with a software renderer that is dependent on the host CPU's performance. Calculations that are normally reserved for your 3D accelerator are instead sent to the CPU for processing and rendering. The frame-rate generated in each test is used to determine the final score.
It was another photo-finish in the 3DMark06 CPU performance test. Technically, the P5Q Deluxe put up the best score, but its 12 point margin of victory falls well within the margin of error in this test. |
| Gaming: Crysis and F.E.A.R. | ||||
For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Crysis and F.E.A.R. When testing motherboards or processors with Crysis or F.E.A.R., we drop the resolution to 800x600, and reduce all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible. However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for the games' physics engines and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually do place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.
Remember those lower peak memory bandwidth and higher latency scores in the SiSoft SANDRA benchmarks? Well, here's where they've appeared to have an affect. In both the Crysis and F.E.A.R. low-resolution tests, the P45 based Asus P5Q Deluxe finished behind its X48-based counterparts, to the tune of 6% to 10%. We suspect there is still some BIOS tuning work to do, to get the P45's performance up here a bit. |
| Power Consumption | ||||
Before we bring this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test systems were consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the motherboards alone.
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| Our Summary and Conclusion | ||||
Performance Summary: The Asus P5Q Deluxe performed well throughout our testing. In the synthetic SANDRA benchmarks, the board posted slightly lower scores than a comparably equipped X48-based system, but that didn't hold the P5Q back in the majority of our real-world application tests. In PCMark Vantage the P5Q put up some solid performance numbers, and it finished neck and neck with or slightly ahead of the X48 in our 3D rendering and encoding tests. It was only in the gaming tests that the P45-based Asus P5Q Deluxe trailed by a few percentage points.
Although we didn't receive a full retail-ready Asus P5Q Deluxe for testing purposes, we're still confident in drawing a few conclusions here. Even though there is still some obvious BIOS tuning work to do, the P45-based P5Q Deluxe's performance at this early stage was very good and we had no problems with instability to speak of. Overclocking was also quick and painless, power consumption was relatively low, and the chipset ran nice and cool. Taking all of these characteristics into consideration, we can't help but like the P45 and suspect it is going to be as popular as last year's P35.
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As many of you are no doubt aware, Intel is planning to officially release a new mainstream chipset in a few weeks, the P45. From a feature standpoint, the new P45 is somewhat similar to last year's P35. The P45, however, will have official support for PCI Express 2.0, with a more flexible lane configuration for multi-GPU graphics, and the chipset itself is being manufactured at 65nm as opposed to 90nm. Using the more advanced process to build the chips should result in lower power consumption and lower operating temperatures as well. The P45 will also be paired up with a new ICH10-series southbridge, which is similar to the ICH9 sans a few legacy features.;)
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