ASUS P5GD2-Premium Motherboard

Testing: Memory Bandwidth

Test System

• ASUS P5GD2 Premium & Intel D915GUX Reference Motherboards
• Intel Pentium-4 3.4EE
• HIS X600XT Video Card
• Crucial 2x512mb PC2-4300 DDR2 Memory
• 80 Gb Wester Digital WD800 SATA HDD
• Windows XP Professional w/ SP2 & DirectX 9.0C

Sandra 2005

Sisoft Sandra 2005 is designed to test the theoretical power of a complete system and individual components. The numbers taken though are purely theoretical and may not represent real world performance. Higher numbers represent better performance in memory bandwidth.

Everest

Everst is a professional system information, diagnostics and benchmarking program for Win32 platforms. It extracts details of all components of the PC. It also tests the actual read and write speeds of your memory giving a fairly accurate look of true memory performance.

ScienceMark 2

ScienceMark 2.0 tests a series of different memory bandwidth algorithms, and allow the platform to choose that which suits it best. The authors of ScienceMark 2 provide the assembly source online to assure that their tests are “truly” unbiased, and give all platforms an equal opportunity to achieve maximum performance.

Memory Bandwidth Results

It is always interesting to see memory bandwidth results because each benchmark uses a slightly different algorithm and code-base to test the bandwidth. As a result, each of the three memory benchmarks we have shown give a slightly different MB/s result. It is still known that Sandra Memory Bandwidth is still the industry standard when it comes to providing memory bandwidth results, but as you can see by our charts, it also happens to give the highest value as the result.

With all of this said, across the benchmarks, the ASUS P5GD2 Premium is able to give slightly higher bandwidth results. The only place where the reference i915 motherboard challenges the consistency of the results is on the Write speed Everest result. This result, along with Sandra’s Unbuffered results, tells us that the real-world memory bandwidth is probably going to be pretty much equal in actual performance.