Testbed and Methods

It is extremely interesting to check out the performance of Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mainboard, because it is the first mainboard on Intel P35 chipset in our lab. We decided to compare it against a few mainboards from the same price range based on competing chipset solutions. So, the today’s rivals will be ASUS P5B Premium on Intel P965 chipset and ASUS P5N-E SLI on Nvidia nForce 650i SLI.

We will look at the mainboards’ performance in two work modes: when the CPU is working at the default front side bus frequency of 266MHz and when the FSB is overclocked to 400MHz. Therefore we used a Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor overclocked to 3.2GHz that was configured either as 12 x 266MHz or 8 x 400MHz. The memory in both cases was working at 800MHz with 4-4-4-12 timings (for nForce 650i SLI the Command Rate parameter was set to 1T).

We will use the following hardware for the test session:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 at 3.2GHz (12 x 266MHz or 8 x 400MHz);
• Mainboards:
• Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R (LGA775, Intel P35);
• ASUS P5B Premium (LGA775, Intel P965);
• ASUS P5N-E SLI (Nvidia nForce 650i SLI);
• Memory: 2x1GB DDR2-800 SDRAM (4-4-4-12, Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-10000C5D);
• Graphics card: PowerColor X1900 XTX 512MB (PCI Express x16);
• Disk subsystem: Western Digital WD1500AHFD (Serial ATA-150);
• Operating system: Microsoft Windows Vista x86.