Asus P5WD2 Premium i955X
Our Testing Setup and SANDRA benchmarks
How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered the system BIOS and set each board to their "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults". The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we hit the Windows Update site and downloaded all of the available updates, with the exception of the ones related to Windows Messenger. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers, and removed Windows Messenger from the system altogether. Auto-Updating and System Restore were also disabled, and we setup a 1536MB 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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| Motherboards Tested: Asus P5WD2 (Intel i955X) Asus P5ND2-SLI Deluxe (nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition) nVidia nForce 4 SLI Edition (reference board) Intel D955XBK (Intel i955X reference board) Intel D925XECV2 (Intel 925XE reference board) Common Hardware: Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition Processor @ 3.73GHz 2x512MB Corsair DDR2-667, PC2-5400 @ 533MHz (CL 3-2-2-7) nVidia GeForce 6800GT On-board audio & LAN Western Digital "Raptor" 10,000rpm SATA Hard Drive Software / System Drivers: |
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We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran three of the built-in sub-system tests (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth) that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite of benchmarks. All of these tests were run with the Asus P5WD2 powered by an Intel Pentium 4 EE 3.73 GHz CPU with 1GB of Corsair DDR2 and compared against similar systems from SANDRA's database.
;) SANDRA CPU Arithmetic Benchmark Pentium 4 EE @ 3.73GHz 1024MB DDR2 (CL3) |
;) SANDRA Memory Benchmark Pentium 4 EE @ 3.73GHz 1024MB DDR2 (CL3) |
;) SANDRA CPU Multimedia Benchmark Pentium 4 EE @ 3.73GHz 1024MB DDR2 (CL3) |
Without direct comparisons in SANDRA to choose from, we've opted to just comment on the comparative performance of the P5WD2 with other components in the database. In SANDRA's CPU Arithmetic benchmark, the performance of the 3.73GHz Extreme Edition P4 seems to be on the mark, with scores that are falling in behind a P4 570, which is running just a bit faster at 3.8GHz. The memory bandwidth of the P5WD2 is about 15-20% faster than any of the boards found in SANDRA, although these are admittedly older chipsets that we had to choose from. Finally, in the Multimedia benchmark, we've got scores that were nearly close to or better than three other Pentium 4s, proving that the Asus P5WD2 is no slouch in any department.
