Asus P5W DH Deluxe, 975X Core 2 Duo Ready Motherboard

How we configured our test systems: When configuring our test systems for the following set of benchmarks, 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 DDR2-800 at 4,4,4,12 1T latency.  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 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.

HotHardware's Test Systems Intel Inside

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2007 Pro Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2007 suite (CPU, Multimedia, and Memory) with the Asus P5W DH Deluxe and our Core 2 Duo E6700 processor. All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speed of 2.66GHz. 

P5W DH CPU Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz

P5W DH MM Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz

P5WDH Memory Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz / DDR2-800

BadAxe CPU Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz

BadAxe MM Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz

BadAxe Memory Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz / DDR2-800

On all accounts the P5W DH Deluxe put up slightly better numbers than Intel's own 975X based "BadAxe" motherboard.  Asus has historically been known to tweak their FSB settings a little aggressively even at stock speed settings, so this is not surprising.  In any event, the performance differentials were minimal.