Intel P45 Motherboard Roundup: MSI, ASUS and Gigabyte

Try as I might, you can’t get away from doing some kinds of benchmarks when testing motherboards.  Because all three of these motherboards are using the Intel P45 chipset, we expect performance to be basically the same across the entire trio in terms of storage and connectivity.  There will be some difference in system performance in benchmarks because the ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe runs on slightly faster DDR3 memory compared to the cheaper DDR2 memory used on the Gigabyte and MSI motherboard but even that should be minimal. 

Regardless, testing needed to be done!  So I took a handful of benchmarks including SiSoft Sandra, CineBench 10, LAME MP3 Encoder, Far Cry 2 and HDTach (for SATA testing) to see how the boards compared.  Here is the quickie system configuration:

• Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770
• 4GB DDR2-1066 – Gigabyte EP45-DS3R and MSI P45 Platinum
• 4GB DDR3-1600 – ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe/WiFi AP
• 150GB Raptor X hard drive
• 800 watt Thermaltake PSU
• GeForce GTX 280 1GB GPU

Let’s see how the benchmarks show these three motherboards stacking up…

SiSoft Sandra 2009 SP1

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The latest version of SiSoft Sandra offers up a lot of new features including GPU performance testing and Nehalem processor support.