ASUS M2R32-MVP vs ECS KA3 MVP Extreme: CrossFire Xpress 3200 Shootout

Test Systems Specifications ATI CrossFire XPress

Futuremark PCMark05 Synthetic CPU and Memory Assessment

Starting off performance testing of the two CrossFire Xpress 3200 motherboards, we ran both CPU and Memory performance modules of FutureMark's PCMark05.  Each results graph is prefaced by FutureMark's explanation of what each test does to arrive at its scoring metric.

"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. The CPU Test Suite also includes multithreading: two of the test scenarios are run multithreaded; the other including two simultaneous tests and the other running four tests simultaneously. The remaining six tests are run single threaded. Operations include, File Compression/Decompression, Encryption/Decryption, Image Decompression, and Audio Compression" - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.

The performance deltas with PCMark05's CPU module were very close, with the ASUS M2R32-MVP edging out the ECS KA3 MVP Extreme by a mere 7 points overall.

"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing."  - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.

With PCMark05's Memory module, the performance margins were close once again, although this time the ECS board topped the ASUS test bed by 26 points overall.  Both of these PCMark05 test results are in fact so close that we would consider this particular performance comparison a virtual dead heat.