Intel P965: The Double Mint Twins Gone Wild
by Gary Key on November 9, 2006 8:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Test Systems: Benchmark Setup
Our Gigabyte and Biostar boards both support the current range of socket 775 Intel processors. We chose an E6300 for testing as we feel this will be a very popular Core 2 Duo CPU choice with the P965 motherboards, particularly these two "budget" priced models. We originally chose our GEIL PC2-6400 GX22GB6400PDC as it represented an excellent blend of price and performance although that is no longer the case due to the significant increase in pricing. Until DDR2 pricing drops down to reasonable levels again we would suggest the Crucial TY2KIT12864AA663 or something similar that will allow you to reach DDR2-1000 when overclocking the E6300. The other suggestion would be to move up to the E6400 or E6600 processor series so the memory overclocking requirements are not as strenuous or expensive.
A 2GB memory configuration is now standard in the AT testbed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of memory. Our choice of DDR2-800 memory from GEIL offers a very wide range of memory settings during our stock and overclocked test runs. Our memory timings are set based upon determining the best memory bandwidth via MemTest 86 and our test application results for each board.
We are utilizing the MSI X1950XTX video card to ensure our 1280x1024 resolutions are not completely GPU bound for our motherboard test results. We did find in testing that applying a 4xAA/8xAF setting in most of today's latest games created a situation where the performance of the system starts becoming GPU limited. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this article at standard settings. We will not report on 1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF single and ATI CrossFire performance until part four of the roundup. However, we will state that since our games are GPU limited at that setting all initial results in our testing are within one percent of each other.
Our Gigabyte and Biostar boards both support the current range of socket 775 Intel processors. We chose an E6300 for testing as we feel this will be a very popular Core 2 Duo CPU choice with the P965 motherboards, particularly these two "budget" priced models. We originally chose our GEIL PC2-6400 GX22GB6400PDC as it represented an excellent blend of price and performance although that is no longer the case due to the significant increase in pricing. Until DDR2 pricing drops down to reasonable levels again we would suggest the Crucial TY2KIT12864AA663 or something similar that will allow you to reach DDR2-1000 when overclocking the E6300. The other suggestion would be to move up to the E6400 or E6600 processor series so the memory overclocking requirements are not as strenuous or expensive.
| Standard Test Bed Performance Test Configuration |
|
| Processor: | Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86GHz, 2MB Unified Cache) |
| RAM: | GEIL PC2-6400 800MHz Plus (2x1GB - GX22GB6400PDC) 2.20V (Micron Memory Chips) |
| Hard Drive: | Seagate 320GB 7200RPM SATA2 16MB Buffer |
| System Platform Drivers: | Intel - 8.1.1.1001 |
| Video Cards: | 1 x MSI X1950XTX |
| Video Drivers: | ATI Catalyst 6.10 |
| CPU Cooling: | Scythe Infinity |
| Power Supply: | OCZ GameXstream 700W |
| Optical Drive: | Sony 18X AW-Q170A-B2 |
| Case: | Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 |
| Motherboards: | ASUS P5B-E (Intel P965 C2, 1.01G) - BIOS 0601 (2.10V RAM) ASUS P5B-E (Intel P965 C2, 1.02G) - BIOS 0601 Abit AB9-Pro (Intel P965 C1) - BIOS 1.5 BioStar T-Force 965 Deluxe (Intel P965 C1) - BIOS IP96a803 BioStar T-Force 965PT (Intel P965 C1) - BIOS P96CA914BS Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 (Intel P965 C2) - BIOS F6 Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 (Intel P965 C2) - BIOS F7 ASUS P5NSLI (NVIDIA 570SLI) - BIOS 0601 ASUS P5W-Deluxe (Intel 975X) - BIOS 1407 |
| Operating System: | Windows XP Professional SP2 |
| . | |
A 2GB memory configuration is now standard in the AT testbed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of memory. Our choice of DDR2-800 memory from GEIL offers a very wide range of memory settings during our stock and overclocked test runs. Our memory timings are set based upon determining the best memory bandwidth via MemTest 86 and our test application results for each board.
We are utilizing the MSI X1950XTX video card to ensure our 1280x1024 resolutions are not completely GPU bound for our motherboard test results. We did find in testing that applying a 4xAA/8xAF setting in most of today's latest games created a situation where the performance of the system starts becoming GPU limited. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this article at standard settings. We will not report on 1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF single and ATI CrossFire performance until part four of the roundup. However, we will state that since our games are GPU limited at that setting all initial results in our testing are within one percent of each other.
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Gary Key - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
It is coming. We had to retest all of the high-end boards with CrossFire capability since the official 6.10 drivers we used generated measurable differences (sometimes better than 7%) in several games compared to the early beta 6.10 drivers. We did not see this issue with our single card testing.Sho - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
Ah, ok :). Rock on.JarredWalton - Friday, November 10, 2006 - link
Gary also neglected to tell you about his latest hard drive "testing", in the which he lost many of his in-the-work articles. I keep telling him that he shouldn't stress test his own hardware, but does he listen? Noooo! I really ought to run RAID 1 or start do more frequent backups, come to think of it....