MSI P35 Platinum Combo Intel P35 Motherboard

Name: MSI P35 Platinum Combo Intel P35 Motherboard - Page 6
Brand: MSI

by Jeff Bouton — Thursday, March 20, 2008, 01:30 PM EDT

PCMark Vantage Continued & 3DMark06

Page 6: PCMark Vantage Continued & 3DMark06

Futuremark PCMark Vantage

Synthetic Benchmarks

Vantage Productivity suite includes the following tests:

Productivity 1 - Two simultaneous threads, Text editing, HDD: application loading
Productivity 2 - Two simultaneous threads, Windows Contacts: search, HDD: Windows Defender
Productivity 3 - HDD: Windows Vista start-up
Productivity 4 - Three simultaneous threads, Windows Contacts: search, Windows Mail: Run Message Rules, Web page rendering: simultaneously open various pages from IE7 Favorites in separate tabs, close them one by one

In the productivity test, we recorded the largest margins between the DD2 and DDR3 configurations thus far. The scores were near 10% less running with DDR2, coming close to the performance of the nForce 590 SLI Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5. The MSI K9A2 Platinum managed to top the P35 Platinum Combo with DDR2, but the best overall performance was achieved with the P35 Platinum Combo and DDR3 memory.

The Vantage HDD suite includes the following tests:

HDD 1 - HDD: Windows Defender
HDD 2 - HDD: game HDD
HDD 3 - HDD: importing pictures
HDD 4 - HDD: Windows Vista start-up
HDD 5 - HDD: video editing
HDD 6 - HDD: Media Center
HDD 7 - HDD: Adding music to Windows Media Player

PCMark Vantage's HDD test tended to favor the Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5 by a fair margin, while the two MSI motherboards were nearly tied across all three configurations.

Futuremark 3DMark06 - CPU Test

Simulated DirectX Gaming Performance

3DMark06's built-in CPU test is a multi-threaded DirectX gaming metric that's useful for comparing relative performance between similarly equipped systems. This test consists of two different 3D scenes that are processed with a software renderer that is dependent on the host CPU's performance. Calculations that are normally reserved for your 3D accelerator are instead sent to the CPU for processing and rendering. The frame-rate generated in each test is used to determine the final score.

This test shows that the raw CPU performance of the MSI P35 Platinum Combo is not affected by running either DDR2 or DDR3. The Athlon based systems trailed by approximately 160 points in this test.