Test Setup and Memory Benchmarks

Since the P35 chipset is really just an incremental upgrade of the existing 975X/P965 chipset family, I left most of our benchmarks out and focused instead on looking at the Gigabyte P35-DS3R DDR2-800 memory performance versus the DDR3-1066 memory performance the Asus P5K3 Deluxe provided. 

Here’s the test setup:

Intel P35 Chipset Motherboard Test System Setup

CPU

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6700 – Review

Motherboards

Gigabyte P35-S3R
Asus P5K3 Deluxe
EVGA nForce 680i MotherboardReview

Memory 

Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C4 / 4-4-4-14 CAS4
Corsair Twin3X2048-1067C7 / 7-7-7-20 CAS7

Hard Drive

Western Digital Raptor 150 GB – Review

Sound Card

Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value

Video Card

ATI X1900 XTX

Video Drivers

AMD Catalyst 7.4

Power Supply Silverstone Zeus 650 watt

DirectX Version

DX10

Operating System

Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

For my initial testing I ran SiSoft Sandra, PCMark05, USB and SATA performance on HDTach 3.0.1.0 and I threw in some power testing as well to make sure the new chipsets weren’t out of line.

Intel P35 Motherboards - Asus and Gigabyte - Motherboards 115

Intel P35 Motherboards - Asus and Gigabyte - Motherboards 116

Intel P35 Motherboards - Asus and Gigabyte - Motherboards 117

While the SiSoft CPU test shows no difference, the DDR3-1066 memory on the Asus P5K3 Deluxe motherboard actually sees a performance gain in the synthetic memory tests from Sandra.  If I recall correctly, that didn’t happen with the initial batches of DDR2 motherboards and modules, which bodes well for DDR3 support.

PCMark05 scores saw a very slight increase but in reality the scores are even enough to call the results a tie.

« PreviousNext »