ABIT AA8 DuraMAX and ASUS P5AD2 Premium- New Alderwoods From The Big Dogs
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 comprise the SANDRA 2004 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Cache, and Memory). We ran all of these tests with the ASUS P5AD2 Premium and ABIT AA8 DuraMAX set to 3.4GHz on ourPrescottcore P4 and DDR2 533 CAS3 speeds.
 |
|
ABIT AA8 DuraMAX;) CPU @ 3.4GHz |
ABIT AA8 DuraMAX;) Memory @ DDR2 533 |
ABIT AA8 DuraMAX;) Multimedia @ 3.4GHz |
ASUS P5AD2 Premium ;) CPU @ 3.4GHz |
ASUS P5AD2 Premium ;) Memory @ DDR2 533 |
ASUS P5AD2 Premium ;) Multimedia @ 3.4GHz |
The main take-aways here are that CAS3 DDR2 Memory at 533MHz, with Intel i925X chipset based-boards like these, is about on par with CAS2 DDR400 memory and the i875. The CPU and Multimedia numbers fall right in line as expected, with P4 550 3.4GHz numbers. And lastly, it's obvious to note that at default speeds, ASUS likes to tweak its FSB speeds ever so slightly on the upside. Note the CPU speed at 3.44GHz, although we had both boards set to 200MHz manually in the BIOS. This also affects the P5AD2's memory speeds. So keep that in mind with the benchmarks that follow here. ASUS boards typically cheat bus speeds just a little at stock speed settings, plain and simple.
