ASUS P5WD2 Premium: Intel 3.73GHz Extreme Edition, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWIN2X PC5400, ATI Radeon X850XT, 73GB WD Raptor, Windows XP SP1.

NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI: Intel 3.73GHz Extreme Edition, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWIN2X PC5400, 2 x NVIDIA 6800GT, 73GB WD Raptor, Windows XP SP1.

EPoX EP-5LWA+ 925XE: Intel 3.73GHz Extreme Edition, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWIN2X PC5400, ATI Radeon X850XT, 73GB WD Raptor, Windows XP SP1.

Going up against the ASUS P5WD2 Premium will be the EPoX EP-5LWA+ (a 925XE based board), and the reference NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI. The setups all share similar peripheral components, except the nForce 4 SLI will be running two NVIDIA 6800GTs since that is the ideal configuration. Given that all our benchmarks are CPU dependent, it should not influence the scores. All tests on the nForce 4 board was done with SLI enabled.

Onboard audio was enabled in the BIOS for all the boards, but not used during game testing. Any system tweaks and ram timings were configured to the best possible for each platform. All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average scores being displayed.

Test Software is as follows:

SiSoft Sandra 2005 - Our standard synthetic benchmark suite, updated to version 2005. While it doesn't provide real-world information, it does give us a base for the rest of the tests.

SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation - A scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Like the SiSoft tests, higher numbers are better.

PiFast - A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

TMPGEnc 2.521 - We used an Animatrix file, titled The Second Renaissance Part 1, and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

CDex Audio Conversion Wav to MP3 - CDex was used to convert a 414MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

Doom 3, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2004 @ 640x480, LQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. These results are real-world, and higher scores are better. Bench'emAll was used to collect numbers from Far Cry and UT2004.

SiSoft Sandra 2005 CPU

SiSoft Sandra 2005 MMX

SiSoft Sandra 2005 Memory

Thankfully for the boards involved, there wasn't much difference between any of the Intel chipsets in the synthetic tests. The only exception was the memory benchmarks where the nForce 4 and 955X cleaned house due to their support for higher frequency ram. NVIDIA's memory controller was slightly more efficient here.

SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation

Similar results again, but the ASUS board finished on top of the pack by a small margin.

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