EPoX EP-5LDA+GLI 945P Motherboard
Test System Specifications and SANDRA
How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered their 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 all of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were 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.
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| SYSTEM 1: Intel Pentium D 820 (2.8GHz) EPoX EP-5LDA+GLI 2x512MB PQI DDR2-667 GeForce 6800 GT On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD 80GB HD 7200 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 Intel 7.2.2.1006 NVIDIA Forceware v81.95 DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 2: Intel Pentium D 820 (2.8GHz) Abit AL8 945P 2x512MB PQI DDR2-667 GeForce 6800 GT On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD 80GB HD 7200 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 Intel 7.2.2.1006 NVIDIA Forceware v81.95 DirectX 9.0c |
Software: SiSoft Sandra 2005 FutureMark PCMark05 Content Creation Winstone 2004 PC World's World Bench 5.0 -Photoshop 7 Module -Office XP SP2 Module -Windows Media Encoder 9 Module Lame MP3 Adept Development's KribiBench v1.1 Cinebench 2003 Unreal Tournament 2004 Doom 3 |
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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 four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Cache, and Memory) with the Pentium D 820 installed into our test rig.
;) CPU Arithmetic Benchmark |
;) Multimedia Benchmark |
;) CPU Cache Benchmark |
;) Memory Benchmark |
Using the SANDRA synthetic test to get an idea of the EP-5LDA+ GLI's performance compared to its peers yielded no surprises. The board's performance was within expected ranges for all four SANDRA modules. In the pages ahead, we'll run a number of more specific tests to get a better idea on how this product compares to similarly equipped systems.
