ASUS Striker II Extreme: Mucho Bang, Mucho Bucks

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.