EVGA P55 FTW LGA1156 Motherboard Review

SuperPI Benchmark

SuperPi calculates the number of digits of PI in a pure 2D benchmark. For the purposes of this review, calculation to 32 million places will be used. RAM speed, RAM timings, CPU speed, L2 cache, and Operating System tweaks all effect the speed of the calculation, and this has been one of the most popular benchmarks among enthusiasts for several years.

SuperPi was originally written by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 and was updated later by snq to support millisecond timing, cheat protection and checksum. The version used in these benchmarks, 1.5mod is also the official version supported by hwbot.


Results: A 29% increase in SuperPI 32M is noted going from 2800Mhz to 400Mhz on the i7 860 and EVGA P55 FTW. This is a very nice gain and well worth the effort to overclock. We should also add that these chips are great for PI and 9m26.203 is an excellent time for 4Ghz with a stock operating system. For reference it is almost 3 minutes faster clock for clock (4Ghz) compared to C2D.


CINEBENCH R10

CINEBENCH R10 is a testing suite that assesses your computer's performance capabilities, both 2D and 3D. CINEBENCH runs several tests on your computer to measure the performance of the main processor and the graphics card under real world circumstances.

The test procedure consists of two main components: The first test sequence is dedicated to the computer's main processor. Next, a 3D scene file is used to render an image file. The scene makes use of various CPU-intensive features such as reflection, ambient occlusion, area lights and procedural shaders. In the first run, the benchmark only uses one CPU (or CPU core), to ascertain a reference value. On computers that have multiple CPUs or CPU cores, CINEBENCH will run a second test using all available CPU power.

In this review, x64 single-CPU and multi-CPU rendering speeds will be measured for both stock speed and an overclocked system.


Results: The CINEBENCH R10 results show an impressive increase in performance in rendering moving from a stock system to an overclocked system. Improvements in rendering time of 30% and 31% are noted for single-CPU and multi-CPU rendering benchmarks respectively.


Sandra Memory Bandwidth, Processor Multi-Media, and Processor Arithmetic

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. The software suite provides most of the information (including undocumented) users like to know about hardware, software, and other devices whether hardware or software. The name “Sandra” is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means "defender", "helper of mankind".

The software version used for these tests is SiSoftware Sandra Professional Home XII.SP2c and the three benchmarks used are the Memory Bandwidth, Processor Multi-Media, and Processor Arithmetic benchmarks. These three benchmarks were chosen as they provide a good indication of three varying types of system performance. The bandwidth test shows performance of memory sub-systems, the multi-media test shows how the processor handles multi-media instructions and data, and the arithmetic test shows how the processor handles arithmetic and floating point instructions. These three tests illustrate three important areas of a computer’s speed and provide a wide scope of results.


Results: Sandra processor arithmetic and multi-media show very impressive improvements on an overclocked system, with 43% gains in performance across the board in arithmetic and multi-media. This is exactly on par with the overclock percentage of 43%!


Results: Memory was ran at the same speeds for both tests: 800Mhz (DDR1600) at 7-7-7-21 1T. As a result it is not surprising to see modest gains in bandwidth with a CPU overclock; a gain of 7%. We do want to note however that this bandwidth is very good and really helps with that PI time.