Asus P5W64-WS Professional 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

Futuremark 3DMark06 - CPU Test Simulated DirectX Gaming Performance

3DMark06's built-in CPU test is a multi-threaded "gaming related" DirectX metric that's useful for comparing relative performance between similarly equipped systems.  This test consists of two different 3D scenes that are generated with a software renderer, which is dependant on the host CPU's performance.  This means that the calculations normally reserved for your 3D accelerator are instead sent to the central processor.  The number of frames generated per second in each test are used to determine the final score.

Our initial synthetic CPU throughput testing with 3DMark06's CPU Performance Module shows the P5W64 WS on par with its Asus built counterpart and a small notch ahead of the Intel built D975XBX "BadAxe" motherboard. Asus has had a history for aggressively tuning their PLL circuits, even at stock processors settings in the BIOS, so that they tend to garner a slight lead in most standard benchmarks like this, versus conservatively tuned products from the likes of Intel.