by Rob Williams on May 8, 2008 in Motherboards
X48 is new, but there are many boards already begging for your dollars. We are taking a look at the most robust of them all, the P5E3 Premium, which includes built-in WiFi, a great board design and fantastic overclocking abilities. It would almost be a perfect board if it weren’t for the $375 price tag.
HD Tach R/W 3
Simpli Software’s HD Tach RW is a superb storage benchmarking tool, that’s now free for everyone to use. It’s great for benchmarking removable storage or internal storage, such as hard drives, which is what we use it for here. Since we are testing a hard drive with an OS installed, we run read tests only, as write tests would overwrite important information.
Differences so small, it almost hurts to contemplate them.
SiSoftware Sandra XII
Sandra has been in my virtual toolbox for quite some time, and the reason is simply the fact that it includes many different types of synthetic benchmarks and makes for a great all-in-one. The two tests we will be focusing on is the Arithmetic and Multi-Media, however, as they are both CPU-specific.
In the Arithmetic test, the application stresses the CPU to find the maximum ALU instructions per second and floating point operations per second, in millions. In the Multi-Media test, a similar stress is executed to find the maximum int and float instructions per second.
Surprisingly, memory is one area where differences are seen between boards. In this case, both the P5E3 Premium and Maximus Extreme excel, in both bandwidth and latency. The other boards hover around the same. Overall though, these differences are all rather small and would show little difference in real-world tests (as we’ve seen).