The Battle of the P67 Boards - ASUS vs. Gigabyte at $190
by Ian Cutress on January 20, 2011 4:15 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gigabyte
- Asus
- P67
USB Speed
For this benchmark, we run CrystalDiskMark to determine the ideal sequential read and write speeds for the USB port using our 64GB Patriot SuperSpeed USB 3.0 drive. Then we transfer a set size of files from the SSD to the USB drive, and monitor the time taken to transfer. The files transferred are a 1.52 GB set of 2867 files across 320 folders – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are the videos used in the Sorenson Squeeze test.
The Gigabyte board overall has the better USB performance, especially in USB 3.0 read speeds. This is accurately translated by the difference in copy time difference between the ASUS and Gigabyte boards in both USB 2.0 and USB 3.0.
3D Movement Algorithm Test
The first benchmark ran is actually one I have written. My full time job involves computational chemistry, so this first benchmark uses various algorithms for three-dimensional simulation and movement of independent particles. The algorithms both employ uniform random number generation or normal distribution random number generation, and vary in various amounts of trigonometric operations, conditional statements, generation and rejection, fused operations, etc. The benchmark runs through six algorithms for a specified number of particles and steps, and calculates the speed of each algorithm, then sums them all for a final score. This is an example of a real world situation that a computational scientist may find themselves in, rather than a pure synthetic benchmark. The benchmark is also parallel between particles simulated, and we test the single thread performance as well as the multi-threaded performance.
There's barely anything between the boards. The Core i7-920 pulls ahead at stock as it has 8 threads to tackle the workload, whereas the i5-2500K used in the P67 motherboards only has four.
WinRAR x64 3.93
With 64-bit WinRAR, we compress the set of files used in the USB speed tests. WinRAR x64 3.93 attempts to use multithreading when possible.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.2
FastStone Image Viewer is a free piece of software I have been using for quite a few years now. It allows quick viewing of flat images, as well as resizing, changing color depth, adding simple text or simple filters. It also has a bulk image conversion tool, which we use here. The software currently operates only in single-thread mode, which should change in later versions of the software. For this test, we convert a series of 170 files, of various resolutions, dimensions and types (of a total size of 163MB), all to the .gif format of 640x480 dimensions.
Sorenson Squeeze 6.0
Sorenson Squeeze is a professional video encoder, complete with a vast array of options. For this test, we convert 32 HD videos, each a minute long and approximately 42 MB in size, to WMV 512KBps format. Squeeze can encode multiple videos at once, one for each thread.
Conclusions
There is not much in it, but the ASUS board performs better in most benchmarks with one exception - the USB speed (especially the USB 3.0 read) is a step behind the Gigabyte.
137 Comments
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kmmatney - Monday, January 24, 2011 - link
Agreed. The last 3 motherboards I bought all came free (or close to it) in a Microcenter deal. 2 AMD system, and one Intel (socket 775). They all have decent overclocking, and have been plenty stable. Your better off spending the money you save on more RAM, or an SSD.MobiusStrip - Sunday, January 23, 2011 - link
"I'ma get that"You left out the wrong word. The "a" is the beginning of "a-gonna"; the phrase is "I'm a-gonna" do something. If you're going to remove something, it's the "a": I'm gonna get that.
softdrinkviking - Monday, January 24, 2011 - link
For all you know, "I'ma get that" could be widely used in this person's area, how would you know?Don't correct slang, it completely defeats the purpose, and it's kind of insane.
Sufo - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
The "a" is the last a of gonna. The part that is omitted is the "gonn". If you're going to be such a useless pedant, at least get your facts straight.Not the best source, but http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Imma
"nope"
maxnix - Thursday, April 28, 2011 - link
Unfortunately for you, spell checking isn't one of them!Spazweasel - Thursday, January 20, 2011 - link
EVGA seems late to the game. They've announced their first 1155 board (130-SB-E675-KR) on their website, but has anyone actually seen it in the wild (much less reviewed)?seamusmc - Friday, January 21, 2011 - link
Spaz, (chuckle)I thought I read somewhere in their forums that EVGA's first P67 board will be available in February.
Spazweasel - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4142/intel-discovers...Okay, now we know why!
It will be interesting to see if EVGA was among the first to be saying "Hey, something's not right here" and this was the reason.
DanNeely - Thursday, January 20, 2011 - link
The obvious feature gigabytes $260/320 board shas is PCIe bridge chips that allow a huge number of USB3 ports and more x16 slots, although you're only getting higher burst performance per device since they're all still sharing the same 16 lanes from the CPU.The other traditional feature is better mofsets/mofset coolers to allow higher voltages for overclocks if you have the cooling to handle the heat.
Pjmcnally - Thursday, January 20, 2011 - link
This is a great review that I was very happy to read. I picked up the ASRock board at release but I wasn’t sure I had made a good decision.I believe there is one small error in the review, the headers for both lists of board features read “ASRock P67 Extreme4” not “Asus P8P676 Pro” or “Gigabyte P67A-UD4”.