Conroe Buying Guide: Feeding the Monster
by Gary Key & Wesley Fink on July 19, 2006 6:20 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Standard Gaming Performance
We tested with a small group of games due to time constraints, but we picked games based on a variety of game engines to give a quick indication of the boards' performance. Additional testing will be done in our full board reviews but for this roundup we are using Serious Sam 2, Half Life 2: Lost Coast, F.E.A.R, Quake 4, and Battlefield 2. All boards were tested with the EVGA 7900GTX using NVIDIA 91.31 WHQL drivers. The Intel 975X boards were also tested with a single ATI X1900XTX card with the Catalyst 6.6 driver.
The two most performance oriented boards in our roundup are the ASUS P5W-DH and Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 boards, and they complete our gaming benchmarks with scores at or near the top of each game category. The most consistent board in the roundup is the Biostar TForce P965 Deluxe that stayed the course throughout testing by remaining in the middle sector of the group. Although the Biostar board did not finish first, it also did not have swings where it was at the top of one benchmark and near the bottom on another one. The ASRock board finished last among the 7900GTX boards four times and second to last on the Quake 4 test where it had its best showing. Overall, the scores generated by this group of boards are so close that you would be hard pressed to actually see or feel the difference in real game play.
The ATI X1900XTX cards finished significantly behind the NVIDIA cards in Half Life 2: Lost Coast where they generally score even or ahead of NVIDIA depending upon game settings. While their performance in the DOOM 3 engine games are normally several percentage points behind the NVIDIA based cards until recently, the difference in our Quake 4 test is also perplexing with the current 6.6 driver release. We ran our ATI X1900XTX in the ASUS P5N32-SLI board and the percentage differences between the GPUs were the same that we see on the AMD S939 or AM2 platforms. It appears to us at this time there is an ATI driver bug with the current Intel chipsets and Core 2 Duo, or perhaps a lack of optimization.
We tested with a small group of games due to time constraints, but we picked games based on a variety of game engines to give a quick indication of the boards' performance. Additional testing will be done in our full board reviews but for this roundup we are using Serious Sam 2, Half Life 2: Lost Coast, F.E.A.R, Quake 4, and Battlefield 2. All boards were tested with the EVGA 7900GTX using NVIDIA 91.31 WHQL drivers. The Intel 975X boards were also tested with a single ATI X1900XTX card with the Catalyst 6.6 driver.
The two most performance oriented boards in our roundup are the ASUS P5W-DH and Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 boards, and they complete our gaming benchmarks with scores at or near the top of each game category. The most consistent board in the roundup is the Biostar TForce P965 Deluxe that stayed the course throughout testing by remaining in the middle sector of the group. Although the Biostar board did not finish first, it also did not have swings where it was at the top of one benchmark and near the bottom on another one. The ASRock board finished last among the 7900GTX boards four times and second to last on the Quake 4 test where it had its best showing. Overall, the scores generated by this group of boards are so close that you would be hard pressed to actually see or feel the difference in real game play.
The ATI X1900XTX cards finished significantly behind the NVIDIA cards in Half Life 2: Lost Coast where they generally score even or ahead of NVIDIA depending upon game settings. While their performance in the DOOM 3 engine games are normally several percentage points behind the NVIDIA based cards until recently, the difference in our Quake 4 test is also perplexing with the current 6.6 driver release. We ran our ATI X1900XTX in the ASUS P5N32-SLI board and the percentage differences between the GPUs were the same that we see on the AMD S939 or AM2 platforms. It appears to us at this time there is an ATI driver bug with the current Intel chipsets and Core 2 Duo, or perhaps a lack of optimization.
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JarredWalton - Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - link
Erm... onboard sound isn't "legacy". As for the others, the instant you release something without floppy support, someone is going to want to install an OS that needs drivers on a floppy (XP). I still find BIOS updates to be far more successful when done from a floppy as well. Give it another year and the floppy might truly start to disappear; we just need better support for USB storage devices.Makaveli - Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - link
Could u elaborate little more on the painful part of going from the AMD system to the conroe.rjm55 - Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - link
What they said in the recommendations was pretty clear: "Most of our Reference systems have been based on AMD/AM2 for the last couple of years. To be honest, going back to some of those same systems after our Conroe testing, the differences are more obvious and painful than you might think. Conroe is clearly the faster platform - and not by small, barely measurable differences."They said it was painful going back to the slower AMD systems for some testing after working with all these Conroe boards.
phusg - Thursday, July 20, 2006 - link
I think Makaveli's point is how is is slower? Gaming, switching apps, overall? I'm interested in some elaboration on this point too.mine - Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - link
missed the abit ab 9 proonly 965 board so far that showed some improvements in real wotld apps. over the 975.
but great review so far ...wait for more ..
Gary Key - Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - link
We really wanted to include the Abit AB9 Pro, however we did not have time to fully test the latest bios that unlocks the memory timings. We did not feel it would be fair to the readers or Abit to publish numbers until we had a shipping bios for review. I will not go through another a review of system with a bios that is not going to be released. ;-) We will post a follow up once we have concluded our testing.DeathSniper - Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - link
On page 3:I'm thinking you wanted to use 'coarse'? :D
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - link
Our grammar checking software needs an education :D Fixed.archcommus - Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - link
Once again you guys continue to impress me. Can't think of another site that delivers this much (and this high quality) content.Thanks for keeping us informed!
vmsein - Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - link
Hello gentlemen and thanks for the informative article. Could you let us know which BIOS version was used for testing on the P5W-DH? Thanks in advance!