Product Listing

ASUS P5WD2-E Premium (Intel 975X Express)

By Zachary Chan - 29 May 2006

Test Setup

Test Setup

For this review, we will benchmark the ASUS P5WD2-E Premium with the other two Intel 975X Express motherboards we've previously reviewed - MSI's 975X Platinum and the Gigabyte GA-G1975X. However, since the P5WD2-E Premium is the successor to the Intel 955X Express based P5WD2 Premium, we will also use the board as a reference performance gauge in our tests. The following test bed setup configuration will be used for all the motherboards that will be benchmarked:-

  • Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor 3.46GHz (1066MHz FSB)
  • 2 x 512MB Kingston DDR2-667 @ 10-4-4 CAS 4.0
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • Gigabyte GeForce 6600 GT 128MB - with NVIDIA ForceWare 71.84
  • Intel INF 7.2.2.1006 and ICH7R AHCI 5.0.0.1032 driver set
  • Intel INF 7.0.0.1019 and ICH7R AHCI 5.0.0.1032 driver set (ASUS P5WD2 Premium only)
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 (and DirectX 9.0c)


Additional Notes

  • The P5WD2 Premium's (i955X) final memory frequencies were calculated through dividers of the motherboard FSB, thus when running a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition with a 266MHz FSB (1066MHz PSB), the correct dividers for DDR2-667 should have been 4:5. However, we checked that the P5WD2 Premium was running at a 3:4 divider, resulting in a 355MHz memory speed (roughly 710MHz in DDR mode). Users will have to note that this gave the P5WD2 Premium an advantage in benchmark results. ASUS Hyper Path 3 was also disabled during benchmarks so as not to inflate the results further.
  • As mentioned in our previous review, the Gigabyte GA-G1975X comes pre-overclocked to 274MHz FSB. Since Gigabyte has confirmed that the board will in fact ship with this clock speeds, we will perform our benchmarks based on it. Of course, we also scaled down the FSB to the regular 266MHz in order to gauge the actual performance of the board if it had a standard FSB timing.

Benchmarks

The following benchmark applications are used in this review to test the performance of the 975X Platinum:-

  • BAPco SYSmark 2004
  • Futuremark PCMark04
  • SPECviewperf 8.01
  • Futuremark 3DMark03
  • AquaMark3
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