EVGA P55 Classified 200 LGA1156 Motherboard Review

Memory Benchmarks

Everest Ultimate is a very useful tool for any and all benchmarkers or overclockers. With the ability to read most voltage, temperature, and fan sensors on almost every motherboard available, Everest provides the ability to customize the outputs in a number of forms for display on your desktop. In addition to this, the memory benchmarking provides a useful tool of measuring the changes to your memory sub-system when tweaking to measure the differences.

What's not important is the bandwidth difference, obviously we are going to see a massive increase in memory bandwidth going from DDR3-1333 to DDR3-2150. What is interesting to note is the fact that even with just dual channel memory, the P55 platform can almost reach 20K read bandwidth here in Everest. This is surely enough bandwidth to completely flood the CPU regardless of how high it is clocked. Another sign that triple channel memory really is overkill for the X58 platform...until possibly Gulftown arrives.

The latency numbers again really compare well with X58 triple channel performance and make this P55 platform really strong. With 4 core HyperThreading CPU's and feature rich motherboards, performance in a daily machine on P55 is going to closely resemble the X58 platform. Of course with motherboards like this P55 Classified 200 rivaling high end X58 motherboards in price, it really begs the question to the point of high-end P55 setups.

SiSoft Sandra is a popular and well used benchmark in the industry but not really a friend of serious benchmarkers. The results SiSoft Sandra produces have been suspect at times basing the numbers it comes up with on system specs and not actual testing. The latest version of Sandra seems to be one of the few programs that appear to calculate memory bandwidth consistently so we decided to include it in today’s benchmarks. Like we have always said with SiSoft Sandra though, take these results for what they are and nothing more.

I don't even know what to make of these results from SiSoft Sandra. There certainly is a jump from the stock settings up to our overclocked setup but the value isn't as high as I was expecting. Sandra must calculate more of a penalty for dual channel than Everest...oh right, Everest measures bandwidth, Sandra calculates it based on a formula.

ScienceMark is an almost ancient benchmark utility at this point in time and hasn't seen an update in a long time. It is, however, still a favorite for accurately calculating bandwidth on even the newest chipsets.

Sciencemark puts up numbers that are more similar to what we would expect based on the Everest results. Cracking 18.5K in Sciencemark is a pretty tall order so this P55 platform definitely supplies the necessary bandwidth not to starve even a four core processor with hyper-threading.

Let's move on to see how this relatively impressive bandwidth translates into system speed.