Asus P5W DH Deluxe, 975X Core 2 Duo Ready Motherboard
PCMark CPU and Memory Tests
For our next round of synthetic benchmarks, we ran the CPU and Memory performance modules built into Futuremark's PCMark05. For those interested in more than just the graphs, however, we've got a couple of quotes directly from Futuremark that explain exactly what these tests do and how they work.
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"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. The CPU Test Suite also includes multithreading: two of the test scenarios are run multithreaded; the other including two simultaneous tests and the other running four tests simultaneously. The remaining six tests are run single threaded. Operations include, File Compression/Decompression, Encryption/Decryption, Image Decompression, and Audio Compression" - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.
From this point forward in this showcase, we'll be comparing the performance of Asus' 975X Express chipset based P5W DH Deluxe motherboard to Intel's own D975XBX, and an AMD Athon 64 X2 5000+ powered Asus M2N32-SLI motherboard that's based on the NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI chipset.
As you can see, PCMark05's CPU performance module had the P5W DH Deluxe outperforming Intel's offering by a slight margin, similar to what we saw with SANDRA tests. The AMD powered 5000+ system lagged behind by a sizable deficit though.
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"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing." - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.
Oddly enough, though we re-ran this test over and over, the Intel D975XBX shows measurably better memory throughput in this PCMark05 test module though both boards were configured with identical DDR2-800 4-4-4-12-1T timings. Again, though running with the same DDR2 memory speeds, the Athlon 64 5000+/NF590 system couldn't compete, which is more than likely due to the higher bandwidth cache architecture in the Core 2 Duo E6700.
