Intel P965: The Double Mint Twins Gone Wild

Synthetic Graphics Performance

The 3DMark series of benchmarks developed and provided by Futuremark are among the most widely used tools for benchmark reporting and comparisons. Although the benchmarks are very useful for providing apple to apple comparisons across a broad array of GPU and CPU configurations they are not a substitute for actual application and gaming benchmarks. In this sense we consider the 3DMark benchmarks to be purely synthetic in nature but still valuable for providing consistent measurements of performance.



In our first tests, each P965 platform score is so close that there is no real winner or loser. In the more memory and CPU sensitive 3DMark03 benchmark we see the same trend with the P965 boards scoring extremely close and our Biostar 965PT placing second. The Biostar 965PT scores first in the 3DMark06 test and once again is doing better than the P965 Deluxe board. We attribute this to a combination of newer BIOS and the variability in MCH chipsets. We expected the S3 to perform on par with the DS3 but it stays right behind the DS3 in these tests. We will see this pattern repeat itself several times.

General System Performance

The PCMark05 benchmark developed and provided by Futuremark was designed for determining overall system performance for the typical home computing user. This tool provides both system and component level benchmarking results utilizing subsets of real world applications or programs. This benchmark is useful for providing comparative results across a broad array of Graphics subsystems, CPU, Hard Disk, and Memory configurations along with multithreading results. In this sense we consider the PCMark benchmark to be both synthetic and real world in nature while providing consistency in our benchmark results.


Considering our 3DMark results we really did not expect a difference in this benchmark but there is one. The Intel P965 based ASUS boards had scored significantly better than our other P965 boards in previous testing due to the final test which consists of multitasking three different applications. The ASUS P965 boards scored up to 58% better in the File Encryption and HDD Virus section of the test. The File Compression number was around 16% better on the ASUS P965 boards.

After testing the Gigabyte S3 board and noticing it scoring nearly the same as the DS3 board we expected the same with our Biostar twins. We were surprised when the Biostar 965PT had the same basic scores as the ASUS P965 boards. We played detective once again and flashed the Biostar P965PT board with the P965 Deluxe BIOS. The P965PT results were the same as the original P965 Deluxe scores indicating the newer BIOS design does indeed have the benefit of additional tuning.