http://www.elitebastards.com/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=570&Itemid=31&limit=1&limitstart=2http://www.insidehw.com/Reviews/Motherboards/ASUS-P5Q-Pro.html
Test setup
All of today’s testing has been run on the following:
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
- 4GB (2x 2GB) Corsair 800MHz DDR2 RAM
- 4GB (2x 2GB) OCZ 1066MHz DDR3 RAM
- ASUS P5Q Pro
- ASUS P5E3 Premium
- Gigabyte X38-DS5
- 500GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 hard drive
- Pioneer 16x DVD-ROM
- NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB x2
- NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 1GB
- 1000W Thermaltake Toughpower power supply
- Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 1 (64-bit Edition)
The following drivers were used:
NVIDIA ForceWare 174.74 for all graphics board testing
The latest available driver was used for all other devices
Benchmarks used
- WinRAR 3.71
- LAME 3.97
- RazorLAME 1.15a
- x264 benchmark
- Everest Ultimate Edition 4.00.1027
- X-Bit Labs File Copy Test
- DUMeter 3.50
- RightMark 3D Sound 2.3
- Half-Life 2: Episode Two
Elite Bastards custom timedemo, application AA/AF
- Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (Version 1.4)
Elite Bastards custom timedemo, application AA/AF
CPU and memory testing
To see how the P5Q Pro performs, we’ll be putting it up against a couple of competing motherboards – Firstly, Gigabyte’s DDR2-sporting GA-X38-DS5, together with a newer DDR3 utilising part, ASUS P5E3 Premium. Can the P45 chipset keep pace with either of Intel’s more recent high-end chipsets?
To kick off our benchmarking, we may as well begin with what is perhaps one of the least important benchmarks in our suite, testing the memory bandwidth available to our two platforms via Everest’s synthetic tests in this discipline.
While our DDR3-equipped part enjoys its faster 1066MHz clocked memory due to us only using 800MHz DDR2 modules here, there isn’t a great deal to tell between the Intel X38 and P45 platform memory bandwidth-wise, although the Gigabyte board does prove to have a most definite advantage in terms of read bandwidth.
On to real-world CPU performance of our two motherboards now, we begin by using WinRAR’s built in archive extraction benchmark, to see how our processors fare in this kind of common, every day scenario.
Strangely, the P5Q Pro falls some way short when it comes to performance in archive extraction via WinRAR, be it in a single or multi-threaded scenario, leaving it trailing the other two motherboards.
Our next port of call is an even more intensive task for a CPU to carry out, converting MPEG-2 video extracted from a DVD into the increasingly widely used MPEG-4 derivative H.264 format, using the AVI Synth application coupled with the publicly available x264 library. This runs a two-pass encode on the 720×480 source video, with the first pass simply handling scanning the source file while the second actually encodes the video (hence its far slower speed).
All three parts are equal here to all intents and purposes – While the mixture of DDR3 and Intel X48 chipset enjoys a slight boost in the test’s first encoding pass, there’s nothing noteworthy to tell between our X38 motherboard and the P5Q Pro.
Alongside video encoding, encoding WAV files or CD audio to MP3 is another very common task which relies heavily on the CPU – To test performance here, we’ve encoded an entire album (Boards Of Canada’s “The Campfire Headphase”) to 192kbps MP3 using the latest version of LAME, together with the RazorLAME front-end for the application.
ASUS’ P5Q Pro snatches the plaudits in our LAME MP3 encoding test by a solitary second over its two rivals.
Of course, all of this testing with a single application is good and well, but one of the major benefits of a modern, dual-core equipped system is its multi-tasking capabilities - The opportunity to perform two tasks in tandem without seeing major drops in performance. So, to see how our systems pan out under this kind of workload, we’ve run both our x264 encoding and WinRAR archive extraction tests simultaneously, using WinRAR to provide our final measurement of performance.
Again, the P5Q Pro’s disappointing WinRAR performance hurts it here, leaving it behind the X38 and X48-based offerings
I/O testing
Our next port of call is to examine performance of the various interfaces available which handle the transfer of data, be they USB, Serial ATA or via the network.
First on our ‘to do’ list for this section is testing the performance of the Serial ATA ports on-board the ASUS P5Q Pro - To do this, we’ve used X-Bit Labs’ File Copy Test utility. This can be used to recreate various differing disk workloads, of which we have chosen three to represent typical PC usage – MP3, which copies a large number of 3-4MB files to the disk, ISO, which copies a small number of files circa 650MB to the drive, and finally Windows, which represents typical usage when loading an Operating System.
Gigabyte enjoys the best overall Serial ATA performance by some distance courtesy of the GA-X38-DS5. There’s less to tell between the P5E3 Premium and P5Q Pro, but the latter loses out primary on its slower performance when handling a Windows usage scenario.
We can now move on to examine the performance USB 2.0 – Again, we’ll be using File Copy Test to do the honours, this time using only the MP3 and ISO usage scenarios for benchmarking, copying the data from these tests to an external USB 2.0 hard disk.
The P5Q Pro also finds itself a few seconds behind regarding USB 2.0 transfers to an external hard disk drive.
Finally, we move on to test networking performance, courtesy of DUMeter, which we used to measure the average transfer rate of the network cards on board the Crosshair II Formula while transferring a DVD-sized ISO file from one machine to another.
The Atheros network controller used by the P5Q Pro disappoints against the Realtek and Marvell solutions used in the competing boards here, leaving it with the lowest network transfers of the bunch.
Gaming performance
Now (and in lieu of any suitably recent ATI graphics boards to test in a CrossFire configuration), let’s take a look at the kind of gaming performance on offer from these parts with a PCI Express 2.0 supporting GeForce 8800 GT 512MB in place, at a resolution of 1600×1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled.
Less than a single frame per second on average separate these three boards, so there’s really nothing to show between these parts in Half-Life 2: Episode Two
Now, let’s test OpenGL performance on these two motherboards, courtesy of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, again using the same general image quality settings.
Gigabyte’s GA-X38-DS5 actually leads by a couple of frames per second in this title, but again there’s little to tell between our two ASUS offerings utilising the X48 and P45 chipsets, and overall gaming performance is virtually on a par regardless of chipset.
Audio performance
While 3D positional audio is not the focus of on-board audio, and matters have been confused under Windows Vista anyway due to changes in the way DirectSound-based audio is handled in this new Operating System, the performance impact of normal, bog-standard 2D sound is still worth a look across our two platforms to see how things shape up. Thus, we’ve employed RightMark 3D Sound to benchmark the CPU utilisation of 2D audio on our systems under Windows Vista.
None of these audio solutions requires any real amount of CPU utilisation in a modern system, leaving us with nothing to separate the three motherboards from an audio performance point of view.
Conclusions
We mentioned towards the start of this review that Intel’s P45 chipset is more about evolution than revolution, and that remains very much our impression at the end of our stint of testing this particular motherboard. As you’d expect from one of Intel’s offerings, it’s rock solid stable, with a good feature set than never threatens to be too jaw-dropping – In other words, exactly what you’d hope and expect from a mid-range chipset. The biggest plus point of P45 is for anyone looking to put together an ATI CrossFire setup on a budget, thanks to the combination of two electrical PCI Express 16x slots with enough bandwidth to feed two graphics boards without ever looking likely to run into any bottlenecks. Despite all the recent talk from Intel about CPU upgrades being more important than GPU upgrades, it seems that offering multi-GPU capability on a motherboard is here to stay, and is now an important part of even mainstream product offerings, with all but one of ASUS’ P5Q range featuring two electrical PCI Express 16x slots.
This brings us neatly onto the P5Q Pro itself, a board with a tough act to follow considering the success of its direct predecessor, the P5K Pro. In essence, the P5Q Pro offers a very similar experience, with performance that is solid without ever blowing you away, and likewise features that are pretty well balanced for the level and likely price point of the board on offer. Yes, I’d like to see a better eSATA implementation and optical audio out, but that’s exactly the kind of compromise that will likely make this board a tempting proposal towards the budget end of the P45 motherboard market.
In the end then, while both Intel’s high-end X38 and X48 chipsets offer better performance, whether the P5Q Pro becomes a tempting purchase or not will likely come almost entirely down to price. We’re still waiting on retail pricing for this board to be announced, but let’s hope that it’s significant enough to make this offering a worthy consideration. Until that point however, it should be noted that if you’re desperate to upgrade now, then there’s little need to wait for P45 motherboards to appear over simply picking up a P35 part, unless of course you plan on using, or moving to, an ATI CrossFire configuration any time soon.
EDIT: Since initially writing this review, pre-order pricing for the P5Q Pro is now in, and at under £100 at Scan in the UK it’s hard to argue against this board as a bargain given its feature set.
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