System setup and notes
| ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe |
Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 |
ATI Sturgeon System |
|
| Processor | Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, LGA775) |
AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8GHz, 2MiB L2 cache, AM2) |
|
| Motherboard | ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe |
Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 |
ATI Sturgeon Reference - (Xpress 3200 CrossFire) |
| Memory | 2GiB (2 x 1024) Corsair XMS2 PC8500 EPP |
||
| Memory Timings | 4-4-4-12-2T @ 800MHz |
||
| Graphics card(s) | Sapphire Radeon X1900 XTX 512MiB |
||
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GB 7200.9 SATA 3Gbps |
||
| BIOS revision | 0602 (06/30/2006) |
D23 (15/06/06) |
08.00.13 |
| Mainboard software | Intel Inf Update 8.00.1009 |
SATA(AHCI): 2.5.1540.25 IDE: 1.00.0000.3 CHIPSET: 5.10.1000.5 |
|
| Graphics driver | ATI Catalyst 6.6 BETA |
||
| Opperating system | Windows XP Pro SP2 32-bit |
||
Testing software
As we are drawing direct comparisons from the systems above, the same testing software will be used.
- ScienceMark Memory Bandwidth
- ScienceMark Memory Latency
- Pifast calculation to 10M places
- KribiBench
- HEXUS WAV encoding
- HEXUS DivX encoding
- Cinebench 2003
- HDTach 3.0.1.0
The same goes for our 3D testing procedure.
- Far Cry v1.33
- Quake 4 v1.04
- Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05
Our recently reviewed Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 is ideal to run a comparison against. Just for good measure, we'll see how it fairs against the AM2-based ATI Sturgeon System.
As you may remember from our Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 review, that board
had a slightly faster FSB than was selected. The ASUS board also has
the same issue. With the FSB clocked in at 267.1MHz, it makes the CPU
run at 2938MHz. While it's only 10MHz difference, it's worth keeping in
mind that it could be the cause of any small increases in Gigabyte's
favour. Just to recap:
2948.0MHz - 268.0MHz FSB - Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 - Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU
2938.1MHz - 267.1MHz FSB - ASUS P5W DH Deluxe - Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU
2813.0MHz - 200.9MHz FSB - ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 - AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 AM2
On with the testing!
