X48 Roundup: ASUS, ECS & Intel

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.

Most of the boards offer near-identical I/O performance, with the exception of the Intel DX48BT2, which falls oddly behind in the burst mode. Even that difference wouldn’t be noticed in real-world tests, though, since the average MB/s kept consistent.

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.

Both the ASUS Maximus and P5E3 Premium excel in overall memory bandwidth, while the Rampage Formula and DX48BT2 fall in last place. The Rampage Formula’s reason is due to DDR2, though, so the Intel board doesn’t have much of an excuse.