TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

Hardware
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz) LGA775
- x2 1024MB Corsair XMS PC-6400 CAS4 Module(s)
- ASUS P5K Deluxe (Intel P35)
- ECS P35T-A (Intel P35)
- Gigabyte P35C-DS3R (Intel P35)
- Albatron nForce LT 680i (nForce LT 680i SLI)
- ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce 590 SLI)
- OCZ GameXStream (700 watt)
- Seagate 250GB 7200RPM (Serial ATA II)
- ASUS GeForce 8800 GTX (768MB)
Software
- Microsoft Windows XP Pro (SP2)
- Intel System Drivers 7.2.2
- Nvidia nForce 680i SLI 9.53
- Nvidia Forceware 158.22

The above three graphs measure synthetic network, audio, hard drive and 3D performance using three different types of software. SiSoft XI has been used to measure HDD (Hard Disk Drive) and LAN (Local Area Network) performance. As you can see the SATA performance on all four motherboards is identical, while the network performance is also very similar. The X3: Reunion test indicated that the three Core 2 Duo motherboards all suffer from similar performance losses with audio enabled.

The AMD Athlon64 X2 test system rendered considerably less frames per second in this test. Finally 3Dmark2006 was used to measure 3D performance and we took the frame rates from the HDR/SM 3.0 tests. As you can see, the ASUS P5K Deluxe is on par with the Gigabyte P35C-DS3R, which also features the Intel P35 Express chipset.