ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe: An Early Preview of P45 Express Performance
by Kris Boughton on May 13, 2008 2:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Gaming Performance: UT3 and COH
We were actually able to measure a slight performance advantage for P45 when benching Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3). Our best results with this game have always come from Intel-based boards, as UT3 is extremely responsive to low memory latencies when tuned properly. Without a doubt, for those that plan on purchasing no more than one video card for the purposes of playing UT3, this is a great board. Of course, the results become somewhat muddled at higher resolutions due to GPU limitations with each board performing similarly at 1920x1200 pixels. At this point, only another GPU can provide relief and higher frame rates.
Performance of COH: Opposing Fronts at low resolutions has a lot to do with raw CPU muscle, which is why each setup performs nearly the same. At these frame rates, everything is smooth as silk. Enabling AA is good way to improve the image quality when dealing with such a surplus of power.
Even at the higher resolution (1920x1200) Company of Heroes is still entirely playable with just a single 8800 GTS 512MB (G92) GPU. SLI scaling with this game is nearly perfect; adding a second GPU nearly doubled our measured average frame rate from around 110FPS to nearly 210FPS with a 45nm quad-core CPU.
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DigitalFreak - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
Didn't bother to even read the article, did you?JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
See the conclusion. As always, SLI requires an NVIDIA chipset to work. This board does support CrossFire however - in 2x8 PCIe 2.0 configuration, which matches the bandwidth of 2x16 PCIe 1.x seen on implementations like AMD's earlier Xpress 3200 chipset. I seriously doubt doubling the PCIe bandwidth will improve performance all that much, so this looks to be a very good midrange option for CF users. (Note that my personal gaming rig runs X38 and 3870 CF.)deruberhanyok - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
I've got a P965 board and was thinking of replacing it with a P35 board. I keep putting it off for one reason or another.IMO there's a handful of things about P45 that make it interesting to me and potentially worth a little extra wait, but I'm not sure how they'll pan out:
* lower power consumption - curious to see how final silicon will compare to P35
* ICH10 - I thought this is supposed to have a built in wireless-N NIC capability? If it does, hopefully someone will make use of it
* PCI Express 2.0 - whether this really makes a difference over 1st gen or not, it's a nice marketing bullet point
Also, seeing a new Analog Devices CODEC makes me smile. Looking forward to seeing info on Asus' mainstream version of this (which I'm guessing would be a P5Q-E or thereabouts), hopefully it will sit around the same price as the P5K-E.
Thanks for the article!
npp - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
The board is a very strong offering from Asus, no doubt about that. I don't see any reasons to upgrade from something like P35, though, the differences in both performance and power consumption simply aren't large enough for me to justify it. Generally speaking, buying a relatively expensive product when a major platform shift is imminent can never be easily justified - like buying a Pentium 955EE just before the Core 2 Launch :]Continuing with the obvious "Nehalem" argument - I don't find it wise to recommend DDR3 today, either, just to see it bottlenecked by the antique FSB... Correct me if I'm wrong, but FSB 400 provides theoretical bandwidth of 12800 MB/s, which is easily surpassed by even a single DDR3-1800 module. Having ~3x that bandwidth sounds like a much more convincing argument for an upgrade for me :]
Gerbilhamster - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
hard to make a comparisonAmberClad - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
My ears perked up at the supposed support for 16GB of DDR2. Granted, 4GB dimms aren't exactly commonplace yet, but the theoretical ability to have 8GB with only two slots populated is pretty intriguing. I'm just thinking of all the apps I can leave in the background with all that spare memory available o_o.Staples - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
In a few months, people will be thinking of upgrading from their P35 to the P45. I think for this reason the P35 should be included in every benchmark including the power consumption graph.DigitalFreak - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
Only someone with more money than sense would upgrade from a P35 to a P45 board.Egglick - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
I agree, but for different reasons. The P35 is much less expensive, and if performance is close enough, it could be a better choice until prices on the P45 drop. I personally find $250 for a motherboard to be unacceptable.The only reason I even read the article was to see how the two compared.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
A P35 comparison is forthcoming; Kris didn't have an appropriate board on hand for this article (and he's apparently running around in Asia right now).