MSI P35 Platinum Combo Intel P35 Motherboard
Test System and PCMark Vantage
How we configured our test systems: 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 DDR2-800 with 5,6,6,15 timings or DDR3-1300 with 6-6-6-15 timings. 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, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
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| System 1: Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 (2.3GHz - Dual-Core) MSI P35 Platinum Combo (Intel P35 Express Chipset) 2x1GB OCZ Gold XTC PC2 8800 CL 5-6-6-15 - DDR-800 2x1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 CL 6-6-6-15 - DDR-1300 Sapphire RX2600XT On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio WD740 "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows Vista Ultimate Catalyst 8.1 DirectX Redist (November 2007) |
System 2: AMD Athlon X2 5200+ (2.6GHz - Dual-Core) MSI K9A2 Platinum (AMD 790FX Chipset) 2x1GB OCZ Gold XTC PC2 8800 CL 5-6-6-15 - DDR-800 Sapphire RX2600XT On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio WD740 "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows Vista Ultimate Catalyst 8.1 DirectX Redist (November 2007) |
System 3: AMD Athlon X2 5200+ (2.6GHz - Dual-Core) Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5 (NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI Chipset) 2x1GB OCZ Gold XTC PC2 8800 CL 5-6-6-15 - DDR-800 Sapphire RX2600XT On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio WD740 "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows Vista Ultimate Catalyst 8.1 DirectX Redist (November 2007) |
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For our first round of benchmarks, we ran all of the modules built into Futuremark's PCMark Vantage test suite. Vantage is relatively new benchmarking tool that we've incorporated into our arsenal of tests here at HotHardware. Here's how Futuremark positions their new benchmarking tool:
"The PCMark Suite is a collection of various single- and multi-threaded CPU, Graphics and HDD test sets with the focus on Windows Vista application tests. Tests have been selected to represent a subset of the individual Windows Vista Consumer scenarios. The PCMark Suite includes CPU, Graphics, Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and a subset of Consumer Suite tests."
In overall performance, the P35 Platinum Combo offered slightly higher results with DDR2 memory installed. The Athlon X2 5200+ comparison systems trailed both configurations overall, but competed well in several individual tests as you'll moving ahead.
The first specific test we'll cover is the PCMark Vantage "Memories" suite which is comprised of the following tests:
Memories 1 - Two simultaneous threads, CPU image manipulation and HDD picture import
Memories 2 - Two simultaneous threads, GPU image manipulation and HDD video editing
Memories 3 - Video Transcoding: DV to portable device
Memories 4 - Video Transcoding: media server archive to portable device
Memories 4 - Video Transcoding: media server archive to portable device
The DDR2 and DDR3 configurations offered near identical performance while the nForce 590SLI based system competed well, trailing by just shy of 100 points.
Vantage TV and Movies suite includes the following tests:
TV and Movies 1 - Two simultaneous threads, Video transcoding: HD DVD to media server archive, Video playback: HD DVD w/ additional lower bitrate HD content from HDD, as downloaded from the net
TV and Movies 2 - Two simultaneous threads, Video transcoding: HD DVD to media server archive, Video playback, HD MPEG-2: 19.39 Mbps terrestrial HDTV playback
TV and Movies 3 - HDD Media Center
TV and Movies 4 - Video transcoding: media server archive to portable device, Video playback, HD MPEG-2: 48 Mbps Blu-ray playback
With Vantage's 'TV and Movies' Test, performance was very close with all configurations, with the P35 Platinum Combo putting up the best showing overall.
