ASUS P4R800-V Deluxe

ASUS P4R800-V Deluxe Motherboard
Foxconn 875A02-6EKRS Motherboard

Albatron PX875 ProMotherboard

BFG Asylum GeForce FX 5700 Ultra 128MB

512MB Kingston HyperX PC3500 DDR-RAM

Western Digital 30GB ATA-100 7200RPM Hard Drive

Creative 52X CD-ROM

Windows XP Pro SP-1

DirectX 9.0b

NVIDIA Forceware v53.03

ATI Catalyst 4.3

SiSoft Sandra Professional 4

Typically we like to get the show started by running a few popular synthetic benchmarks.  SiSoft Sandra Professional 4 is our staple synthetic test, offering a quick and easy view of how the hardware should stack up against its peers.  We ran several of the more common modules such as the CPU, Multimedia, and Memory tests with integrated graphics and again with a GeForce FX 5700 Ultra installed...

CPU @ 2.4GHz 9100 IGP	Multimedia @ 2.4GHz 9100 IGP	Memory @ 200MHz 9100 IGP
CPU @ 2.4GHz 5700 Ultra	Multimedia @ 2.4GHz 5700 Ultra	Memory @ 200MHz 5700 Ultra

The CPU and Multimedia tests showed the system performing similarly with both graphics options.  Interestingly, we saw a minor dip in the CPU test with the video card installed, when we would've expected a minor increase as the Multimedia module reported.  With the Memory test we saw a gain of roughly 100 points with the 5700 Ultra installed, because available system memory bandwidth isn't being used for video data.  Overall, nothing too surprising to report.  Our next round of tests will aim to paint a clearer performance picture.

Another staple in the HotHardware labs for testing motherboards is PCMark04.  The beauty of this benchmark is its ability to assess all of the key aspects of a motherboard's performance, covering CPU, Memory, Graphics and Hard drive performance.

The overall system performance fell short compared to the i875 comparison systems, lagging by an average of 300 points in total score when using the integrated Radeon 9100 graphics.  The main factors attributing to this difference was video and memory performance, while there was more parity between the CPU and Hard Drive results.  Once we installed a video card, this freed up the 128MB of main memory and increased the graphics horsepower of the system.  This upgrade resulted in a major increase in the graphics module, helping the system compete well with the 875 based boards.  The Memory module scores also improved, however, the results were a bit lower than the i875 chipset based systems.