Four-Way Gigabyte P45 Motherboard Round-Up
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- Gigabyte EP45-DQ6 Intel P45 (DDR2) Motherboard
- Gigabyte EP45-DS3L Intel P45 (DDR2) Motherboard
- Gigabyte EP45T-Extreme Intel P45 (DDR3) Motherboard
- Gigabyte EP45T-DS3R Intel P45 (DDR3) Motherboard
- Asus Maximus II Formula Intel P45 (DDR2) Motherboard
- Abit IP35 Pro Intel P35 Motherboard
- XFX nVidia nForce 780i SLI Motherboard
- eVGA Nvidia nForce 680i LT SLI Motherboard
- Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (3.0 GHz Quad-Core, 65nm)
- Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 Memory (4GB / 4 x 1 GB, CAS 4-4-4-12)
- Patrior DDR3-1333 Memory (4GB / 2 x 2 GB, CAS 7-7-7-20)
- Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT 512 MB (175.19 Driver)
- Western Digital Raptor 74 GB Hard Drive)
- Plextor PX-755SA DVD+/-RW Drive
- Corsair HX620W 620W Power Supply
- Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition (32-bit, SP1)
Synthetic CPU and Memory Benchmarks - SiSoft Sandra XII SP2C
Higher Arithmetic and Memory Bandwidth numbers are better, Lower latency numbers are better.
Our basic synthetic benchmarks show us a few things. In terms of raw processing, there is no difference between these boards on various chipsets and designs. However, in terms of their memory interfaces, we see varying performance levels, as Intel CPU’s still rely on the motherboard Northbridge to handle its memory (albeit not for long, as Intel’s next-gen chips move the memory interface on-die).
When loaded up with DDR3-1333 memory, our P45 platforms with DDR3-based memory interfaces perform the best, but only very slightly over Nvidia’s DDR2-based controllers when using DDR2-800 memory. That’s not saying much for DDR3 technology, but it does show a very slight amount of progress. Gigabyte’s P45/DDR2 platforms averaged about 6 GB/s w/ DDR2-800 modules, whereas that gets boosted to 6.3 GB/s w/ DDR3-1333 modules.
