Asus P5WDG2-WS and P5WD2-E Premium - 975X Motherboard Showcase

How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults."  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.

Test System Specifications "Intel & AMD Inside!"

Preliminary Benchmarks with SiSoft SANDRA 2005 Synthetic Testing

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 four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Cache, and Memory) with the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 installed into our test rigs.  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speeds of 3.46GHz.

Asus P5WD2-E Premium CPU Benchmark 3.46GHz Pentium XE	Asus P5WD2-E Premium Multimedia Benchmark 3.46GHz Pentium XE	Asus P5WD2-E Premium Memory Benchmark 3.46GHz Pentium XE
Asus P5WDG2-WS CPU Benchmark 3.46GHz Pentium XE	Asus P5WDG2-WS Multimedia Benchmark 3.46GHz Pentium XE	Asus P5WDG2-WS Memory Benchmark 3.46GHz Pentium XE

The Asus P5WD2-E and P5WDG2-WS both performed similarly in the SiSoft SANDRA benchmarks we ran, which is to be expected considering both boards are built by Asus and feature the same core-logic chipset.  The CPU arithmetic benchmark had each board performing near the top of the charts, with only the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ reference system besting Asus' offerings in the ALU portion of the test.  In the multimedia benchmark though, the 955XE processor and Asus motherboard combinations were was clearly the performance leaders.  And in the memory bandwidth benchmark, both boards put up respectable 6.3GB/s+ bandwidth scores.