ASUS P5Q Deluxe – P45 Is Off to a Great Start

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.

Again, the differences are incredibly small here, and differed on each run, so neither board can be declared an actual winner. This, as always, is a good thing.

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. For DDR2, the P5Q proved a wee bit faster than the Rampage Formula.