DFI LANPARTY LGA775 Showcase: The 925X-T2 & 875P-T

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 its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults."  We then manually configured our RAM to run at 200MHz (DDR400), with the timings set by the SPD.  The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP1) 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, drive indexing, and System Restore were also 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 Inside!"

Preliminary Benchmarks With SiSoft SANDRA 2004 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 2004 suite (CPU, Multimedia, and Memory).  All of these tests were run with our processor set to its default clock speed of 3.6GHz (18x200MHz). 

All four of the systems we tested performed similarly in the three SiSoft SADNRA modules we ran.  In the CPU and Multimedia tests, there aren't any significant differences in performance worth mentioning.  In the Memory Bandwidth test though, while performance was similarly, there is something worth pointing out.  The 925X based DFI LANPARTY 925X-T2 and 925XE Intel D925XECV2 boards were equipped with higher-clocked (533MHz), higher-latency (3-3-3-8), DDR2 memory.  The i875P powered boards were equipped with lower-clocked (400MHz), low-latency (2-2-2-5) DDR1 memory.  Although the i875 isn't quite as new as the 925X, its memory performance holds up well thanks to the low-latency memory we used.  The 925s peaked a bit higher at about 5GB/s, but the i875s were right behind them at about 4.9GB/s.