Test Setup

ASUS P5AD2 Premium: Intel P4 560, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC5400 Pro, ASUS AX600XT, 120GB Seagate SATA 7200rpm, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 4.8.

Intel D925XCV: Intel P4 560, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC5400 Pro, ASUS AX600XT, 120GB Seagate SATA 7200rpm, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 4.8.

Test software will be:

SiSoft Sandra 2004
Business Winstone 2004
Sysmark 2004
PiFast
CDex 1.51
TMPGEnc 2.521
Unreal Tournament 2003
Quake 3: Arena
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Call of Duty

The comparison motherboard will be the Intel D925XCV. Cooling for both motherboards was provided by the stock Intel cooler. The Corsair DDR2 modules will be run at stock PC5400 with 4-4-4-12 memory timings. All benchmarks were run three times with the average score displayed, with the exception of SiSoft Sandra, which was also ran three times, but the first two scores dropped.

SiSoft Sandra 2004

Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds, using the 32-bit 2004 version.

CPU	MMX	Memory

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

	Whetstone iSSE2	Dhrystone ALU
ASUS P5AD2	7493	9605
Intel D925XCV	7321	9412

CPU Multimedia Benchmark

	Integer iSSE2	Floating-Point iSSE2
ASUS P5AD2	25559	34180
Intel D925XCV	22984	30087

Memory Benchmark

	Int Buffered iSSE2	Float Buffered iSSE2
ASUS P5AD2	4805	4800
Intel D925XCV	4756	4753

While the Intel branded board puts out some good numbers, the ASUS P5AD2 Premium cleans house across the board. The memory benchmark is fairly close, but not so much in the multimedia and arithmetic tests.

ZD Business Winstone 2004

The ZD Winstone suite is a script that runs a series of actions and calculates a final score that measures a PC's overall performance.

	Score (Higher is better)
ASUS P5AD2	23.1
Intel D925XCV	22.4

The results are quite close here, with neither board clearly dominating the other. The ASUS outperforms the Intel board by just under one point. I should point out that compared with what we've seen with the Athlon 64, the Pentium 4 still has a little catching up to do.

Sysmark 2004 Office Productivity

Sysmark 2004 is BAPCo's latest revision of the mainstream office productivity and Internet content creation benchmark used to characterize the performance of the business client. It uses a number of real-world applications and runs them through a series of tests. We tested with the office, content creation and web benchmarks.

	Score (Higher is better)
ASUS P5AD2	186
Intel D925XCV	185

Sysmark 2004 Content Creation

	Score (Higher is better)
ASUS P5AD2	213
Intel D925XCV	209

WebMark 2004

	Score (Higher is better)
ASUS P5AD2	146
Intel D925XCV	139

Mirroring what we've seen with all the synthetic tests, the ASUS keeps ahead of the Intel board in all the BAPCo benchmarks. Let's see how they compare in real-world tests.

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