The Asus P4G8X Deluxe Motherboard
Intel E7205 - Granite Bay Infused Horsepower

By, Dave Altavilla
December 18, 2002

The Hot Hardware Test Systems - Continued Good Memory is key Before we dig into the testing, we want to call to your attention the DDR DRAM we used in our test system.  We've been working with Kingston memory around the HH Lab as of late and it is really a top notch product.  For this article, Kingston sent in some of their HyperX PC3500 product.  We didn't pull the heat spreaders off the modules, since time was of the essence in this article.  However, whatever Kingston uses under the hood for memory on this stuff, is really primo grade.     Two things of note here.  First, these are shots of their 512MB stick of PC3500 RAM.  However, we used two of their 256MB sticks for testing with the Asus P4G8X board, since you need two modules in a system to enable Dual Channel DDR mode.  Also, this specific CPU only allowed us to get the FSB up to 150MHz and as such, the memory timings were set to 300MHz DDR due to limitations of the Asus BIOS or the Granite Bay chipset.  However, we have successfully run this memory at 433MHz CAS 2 with 2, 2, 5 settings, with full stability in i845PE boards.  This is great DDR memory folks.  We stand behind it 100% and use it in many of our bench setups.     Performance with SiSoft SANDRA 2003 General system performance

First up on the list of testing software was SiSoft Sandra 2002 Professional.  It's a quick and easy way to compare results from any system against an internal database of similar systems. These benchmarks are theoretical scores, and can't necessarily be measured in real-world terms, but they do provide a good way to make comparisons amongst like components.  We ran a set of tests at both our CPU's default 2.8GHz, and then at the overclocked speed of 3.150GHz.  Here are the results:

The CPU scores are fairly standard issue for a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 setup.  In fact, they are within a couple of points of the reference 2.8GHz system.  However, it seems that Asus consistently gooses up the FSB speeds in their boards, at stock CPU settings, by a couple of MHz just to gain a slight performance advantage.  This is warranty supported overclocking in a sense and we don't have a problem with that.  

What is more impressive to note however, is that at 266MHz DDR, the Asus P4G8X with it's Dual Channel DDR Granite Bay chipset, passes by even the RIMM4200 PC1066 reference test system.  At overclocked speeds of 300Mhz DDR, the P4G8X blows right by the PC1066 reference system.  We're thinking drop this sweet-heart into a Vapochill and watch the benchmarks fly!  We may do just that too.

Lastly, above we've compared the boards ATA100 drive subsystem performance versus an ATA100 SATA RAID 0 setup configured with a pair of Abit Serillel serial to parallel converters, which adapt the parallel standard ATA drives to the SATA interface.  Since this is a serial to parallel conversion and it doesn't support the 150MB/sec throughput of a full SATA interface, the RAID 0 scores here track a standard ATA RAID 0 score.  Regardless, it works and those SATA cables are nice and thin. 

Note on Overclocking:
 
Overclocking with this board was a breeze.  With CPU voltage modification all the way up to 1.9V, we were able to overclock our 2.8GHz Pentium 4 to the  highest air cooled clock speed we've ever reached with this particular CPU.  Again, where the MSI GNB Max left off in this area, the P4G8X from Asus delivers.  Even though memory timings will be set relatively conservatively at 1X FSB speed, this board still performs better than any RDRAM setup we've ever had in the lab, memory bandwidth wise.

Winstone Performance Business and Content Creation Testing

For some actual application benchmarks, we have eTesting Lab's Business and Content Creation Winstone.  These benchmarks run a series of Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Video and Photo  Editing apps etc, often mutli-tasking with several applications open at once.  They are indicative of real world desktop performance, since there are actual Desktop Publishing and Content Creation applications used in the test.

The Business Winstone tests include:

• Five Microsoft Office 2000 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Word)

• Microsoft Project 98

• Lotus Notes R5

• NicoMak WinZip

• Norton Antivirus

• Netscape Communicator

The Content Creation Winstone tests include:

• Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1

• Adobe Premiere 6.0

• Macromedia Director 8.5

• Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev 4

• Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055

• Netscape Navigator 6/6.01

• Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 5.0c (build 184)

The two Granite Bay based solutions, including the Asus P4G8X, lead the pack here in both the Business Winstone and Content Creation Winstone tests.  The P4G8X and GNB Max are right on top of each other and lead the i850E and i845PE setups by as much as 8%.