Asus P6T6 WS Revolution Core i7 Motherboard
Test System and SANDRA Testing
Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, 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 either DDR2-1066 (AMD) with 5,5,5,15 timings, DDR3-1333 with 7,7,7,20 timings (Intel Core 2), or DDR3-1066 with 7,7,7,20 timings (Intel Core i7). The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
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| System 1: Core i7 920 (2.66GHz - Quad-Core - 2.8GHz Intel Turbo Mode Enabled) Asus P6T6 WS Revolution MSI Eclipse Intel DX58SO Gigabyte GA-EX58 Extreme (3-Way SLI testing only) (X58 Express Chipset) 3x1GB Kingston DDR3-1066 CL 7-7-7-20 - DDR3-1066 GeForce GTX 280 On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio 3 x GeForce GTX 285 (High Res Gaming Tests Only) WD150 "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows Vista Ultimate NVIDIA Forceware v180.43 DirectX Redist (August 2008) |
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We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2009 SP1, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2009 SP1 suite with the Asus P6T6 WS Revolution (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speeds of 2.66GHz but with Intel Turbo Boost enabled for a final clock speed of 2.8GHz and 3GB of DDR3-1066 RAM running in triple-channel mode.
Our quick-take SANDRA numbers are rather telling, in terms of what we can expect from this Asus motherboard. As is clearly visible in all metrics listed here, the Asus board is tuned slightly more aggressively versus the Intel and MSI motherboards. Though we had each motherboard configured identically, with the processor set to its stock speed, Intel Turbo Mode technology enabled and DDR3-1066 CL7,7,7,20 memory timings, the Asus board is just a little bit faster in both raw CPU throughput and memory bandwidth. We'll see if these slight differentials play out in real-world benchmark numbers in the pages ahead.
