ASUS Striker II Extreme: Mucho Bang, Mucho Bucks
by Kris Boughton on April 11, 2008 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Overall System Performance with PCMark Vantage
Futuremark claims PCMark Vantage for Vista is the most complete total system-benchmarking suite to date and our experience has shown this to be true. The benchmarks are designed to test the performance of each major subsystem - CPU, memory, graphics, and disk performance based on real world applications. The final score presented at the conclusion of each test run takes into account the results of each carefully tailored test within the benchmark suite.
Because our goal was the measurement and analysis of motherboard performance, we took great care to use equivalent parts whenever possible. As such, each test setup utilized the same exact hard disk drive model, graphics card(s), and installed processors. The only real difference worth nothing is the memory and the chipset installed on each board. We used different modules depending on whether the motherboard tested used DDR2 or DDR3 memory. We used memory from the same manufacturer (and product line) in order to nullify any potential advantage arising from the use of dissimilar components.
As we can see, DDR3 motherboards based on NVIDIA 790i or Intel X48 chipsets score well above those that use DDR2 modules. Clearly, the additional memory read bandwidth and reduced access latencies associated with the faster DDR3 subsystems have a distinct affect on overall system performance. This is worth keeping in mind when it comes to buying your next motherboard - DDR3 prices continue to fall every day and we would argue that these once overly expensive products are now almost within the realm of affordability.
Switching from an E8500 dual-core CPU to a QX9770 quad-core provided an additional performance boost to the tune of about 1000 points on average. The fact that subsystem scores are additive in nature is demonstrated well by the EVGA 780i results - in this case, this same 1000-point increase can be seen, regardless of the initial lower score when compared to the other systems that managed to score higher overall.
Finally, PCMark Vantage measured absolutely no performance advantage when enabling NVIDIA's SLI Technology. Although the benchmark does run a couple of graphics-intensive tests, they are conducted in windowed mode and do not appear to respond to the additional available graphics horsepower provided by multi-GPU configurations.
We can conclude that the scores achieved by each system were a result of the components in use, and had nearly nothing to do with the actual motherboards utilized. That is to say, the motherboard merely functions as a platform for the installation of the components and has little to do with the development of actual performance; rather it simply allows the installed components to reach their full potential.
What this really means is that users who plan to run their systems in stock configurations will have a hard time going wrong with any motherboard examined above (and quite possibly any motherboard based on any of these four chipsets or others). The qualities and individual benefits of each motherboard do not become fully evident until overclocking comes into play. Let's move on to synthetic graphics performance courtesy of 3DMark06.
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takumsawsherman - Saturday, April 12, 2008 - link
But for $400, you only get Firewire 400. Is that like a key, or something? If we pay $800 for a board, will they finally feel as though they can afford to add Firewire800, as Gigabyte did on their $200 boards like 3 or 4 years ago?When they talk about adding firewire itself to a board, does it never occur to them that a faster variation has existed for 5 or 6 years now? How insulting.
Grandpa - Saturday, April 12, 2008 - link
It doesn't matter what the price, performance, make, or model. If the board is unstable I don't want it! I had an Abit board once with a VIA chipset. It corrupted data when large files were transferred between drives. Several BIOS updates later, with the performance down to a crawl, it still corrupted data. Because of that ugly bad memory, stability is number one important for me. So this review is very relevant to others like myself.Super Nade - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
As far as I know, the capacitors you mention are made by Fujitsu's Media division (FP-Cap series), not Fairchild semiconductor. Fujitsu did try to gobble up Fairchild in the 80's, but the US government killed the deal. Apart from this, I am not aware of any connection between these two companies.Here is the link--> http://jp.fujitsu.com/group/fmd/en/services/capaci...">http://jp.fujitsu.com/group/fmd/en/services/capaci...
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Stele - Saturday, April 12, 2008 - link
Super Nade's right. The vendor marking on the capacitors - which have been the same for almost all such solid electrolytic polymer caps used on Asus boards for some time now - is very much that of Fujitsu: a letter 'F' in Courier-esque font between two horizontal lines.Interestingly - and confusingly - however, once upon a time this logo was indeed that of Fairchild Semiconductor... the deal that almost happened in the 80s may have something to do with Fujitsu's current use of the said logo. Either way, Faichild Semi have long since changed to their current logo (a stylised italic 'f') so today, any current/new electronic/semiconductor component carrying the F-between-bars logo is almost certainly a Fujitsu product.
jojo29 - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
Just wondering how the Anandtech's Choice P5E3 Premium ( which i plan on buying) stacks up against this Striker? Any comments? Or did i miss something in the aricle as i was only able to skim through it, as im at work atm, and dontcoughwantcoughtogetcaughtbymybosscough...kjboughton - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
We used one X48 motherboard in this review and it was the ASUS P5E3 Premium. Enjoy the full read when you make it home. ;)ImmortalZ - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
You mention that overclocking the PCI-E bus provided tangible performance benefits on the EVGA board.Did you read about the rumblings around the net about some G92 based cards overclocking their GPU with the PCI-E bus? There are supposedly two clock sources for these type of cards - one on board and the other slaved to the PCI-E bus.
Are you sure that the performance improvement is not because of this anomaly?
CrystalBay - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
Hi Kris, while UT3 does scale very well with multi-core. The game it self has no DX10 support as of yet. Hopefully EPIC will will enable it in a future update...Glenn - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
All the benchies and comparisons are great, but how does it compare to a P35 board? A 965 or X38 board? I doubt you will convert those that already own an X48 and I (P35) have no point of reference within this article to see if I'm 5, 10 or 25% behind the preformance curve?Rolphus - Friday, April 11, 2008 - link
Interesting review... only one question though. Why use the 32-bit version of Crysis on Vista x64? Is there an issue with the 64-bit version that I don't know about?