CrossFire Xpress 1600 Motherboards: DFI, Asus, ECS

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 three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite (CPU, Multimedia, and Memory) with and Athlon 64 X2 4800+ installed into the various CrossFire Xpress 1600 boards we tested.  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speed of 2.4GHz.

The three SiSoft SANDRA subsystem benchmarks we ran didn't reveal anything extraordinary to differentiate one of these motherboards from the others.  All three of the CrossFire Xpress 1600 motherboards we tested posted similar benchmark results in each of the tests.  This is to be expected, however, considering we used the exact same CPU, memory and other components to build up our test rigs.