Asus Blitz Formula and Extreme P35 Motherboards
Our Test Systems and SiSoft SANDRA
How we configured our test systems: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOS 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 DDR2-800 with 4,4,4,12 timings or DDR3-1333 with 7-7-7-18 timings. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the drivers necessary for our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were then disabled and we set up a 1024MB 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.
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| System 1: Core 2 Duo E6750 (2.66GHz - Dual-Core) Asus Blitz Extreme 2x1GB Super Talent DDR3-1600 GeForce 8800 GTX |
System 2: Core 2 Duo E6750 (2.66GHz - Dual-Core) Asus Blitz Formula 2x1GB Corsair PC-6400 GeForce 8800 GTX |
System 3: Core 2 Duo E6750 (2.66GHz - Dual-Core)
Asus P5K Deluxe 2x1GB Corsair PC-6400 GeForce 8800 GTX |
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We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XI, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran six of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA XI suite with a Core 2 Duo E6750 installed in the Blitz motherboards ( CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Multi-Core Efficiency, Memory, Cache, and Memory Latency) . All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speed of 2.66GHz.
;) Asus Blitz Formula CPU @ 2.6GHz CPU Arithmetic |
;) Asus Blitz Formula CPU @ 2.6GHz MultiMedia |
;) Asus Blitz Formula Memory @ DDR2-800 Memory Bandwidth |
;) Asus Blitz Extreme CPU @ 2.6GHz CPU Arithmetic |
;) Asus Blitz Extreme CPU @ 2.6GHz MultiMedia |
;) Asus Blitz Extreme Memory @ DDR3-1333 Memory Bandwidth |
The results reported by the various SANDRA test modules we ran fell right in line with our expectations. The CPU and Multimedia benchmarks were nearly identical between the two boards, which is expected considering they were equipped with the exact same CPU, graphics card, and hard drive. The memory bandwidth results, however, illustrate the difference between DDR2-800 and DDR3-1333MHz RAM. The DDR3-enabled Blitz Extreme offered about 800MB/s more bandwidth than the DDR2-based Blitz Formula (6.3GB/s vs. 7.1GB/s).
