Testbed and Methods

In our previous article devoted to Asus P5K Deluxe mainboard we studied its performance in nominal mode. However, there are a lot of experienced computer users who work on overclocked systems. For some strange reason many reviews out there do not touch upon the performance of overclocked systems. We decided to make up for this omission, so today we are going to discuss the performance of our mainboard against its competitors in overclocked systems.

Like in the previous article, we will compare Asus P5K Deluxe not only against Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mainboard, but also against a few solutions from the same price range but based on the older chipsets. Namely we will take Asus P5B Deluxe on Intel P965 chipset and Asus P5N32-E SLI on Nvidia nForce 680i SLI chipset.

We will compare the performance of our testing participants with the FSB overclocked to 400MHz. We used a Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor overclocked to 3.2GHz that was configured as 8 x 400MHz. The memory was working at 1000MHz with 4-4-4-12 timings.

Our testbeds were configured as follows:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 at 3.2GHz (8 x 400MHz);
• Mainboards:
• Asus P5K Deluxe (LGA775, Intel P35);
• Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R (LGA775, Intel P35);
• Asus P5B Deluxe (LGA775, Intel P965);
• Asus P5N32-E SLI (Nvidia nForce 680i SLI);
• Memory: Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-10000C5D working as DDR2-1000 4-4-4-12;
• Graphics card: OCZ GeForce 8800GTX (PCI Express x16);
• Disk subsystem: Western Digital WD1500AHFD (Serial ATA-150);
• Operating system: Microsoft Windows Vista x86.

Notes:

• We disabled 1T Command Rate mode on Asus P5K Deluxe because it wouldn’t work in the above described conditions; Transaction Booster option set to Auto.
• We disabled 1T Command Rate on Asus P5N32-E SLI for the same reason.
• We had to increase the timings to 5-4-4-15 for DDR2-1000 on Asus P5B Deluxe to ensure acceptable stability.