EVGA P55 Classified 200 LGA1156 Motherboard Review

System Benchmarks

When running the 32M benchmark of SPi, we are calculating Pi to 32 million digits and timing the process. Obviously more CPU power helps in this intense calculation, but the memory sub-system also plays an important role, as does the operating system. SPi 32M has been a favorite amongst benchmarks for these very reasons and is admittedly the favorite benchmark of this reviewer.

Our first benchmark is Super Pi 32M calculation and the gap between our stock setup and the overclocked setup is about 28.5% performance improvement. Keep in mind, the system should have been running at 3.2GHz with turbo because Super Pi is single threaded. So like the single thread of Cinebench and Lame Front End benchmarks, the processor is running at 3.2GHz. So with a 35% CPU overclock, we are seeing almost 30% in SPi performance gain.

The latest iteration of the popular system benchmark is PCMark Vantage from the Futuremark crew. The PCMark series has always been a great way to either test specific areas of a system or to get a general over view of how your system is performing. For our results, we simply run the basic benchmark suite which involves a wide range of tests on all of the sub-systems of the computer.

It is hard to say exactly what the processor speed runs at during a full run of the PCMark Vantage test suite but it is almost a certainty that at some point a single thread is being utilized which may mean a processor speed at 3.2GHz. Regardless, our overclock nets us a 25% gain in performance in PCMark Vantage which is very strong and right up there with what we saw in Super Pi.

Another benchmarking community favorite, Cinebench renders an intense 2D scene relying on all the processing power it can. Cinebench R10 is another 64-bit capable application and is likely the most efficient program tested today at utilizing all cores of a processor. We will be running both the single threaded and multi-threaded benches here today.

So, looking at the results we see a 45% performance gain in the single thread of Cinebench and a 50% increase in performance in multi-threaded performance. This is the indication that during the single thread our processor was running faster resulting in less of a gain. The fact that Cinebench gives us a 50% performance gain in the multiple thread bench with a 53% overclock just goes to show how much Cinebench is an accurate gauge of overclock performance. It isn't often that a CPU overclock almost equals 1:1 performance gains...in Cinebench, it does.

Next up is a real life benchmark where we simply time a common task done on the computer. Encoding DVDs for viewing on the computer or other devices is an increasingly important task that the personal computer has taken on. We will take a VOB rip of the movie Office Space, and convert it into DivX using the default 720P setting of the new DivX converter v7.1.

DivX is another multi-threaded program that appears to run extremely well on the i5 750 processor. We see a full 48% performance increase from stock to overclock setups. This almost mirrors the multi-threaded Cinebench results showing that these programs really benefit from an overclocked system. So if you are encoding, you really owe it to yourself to try a bit of overclocking, even if it isn't as adventurous as our results, it can still shave a lot of time off a project.

Un-like the DivX conversion we just looked at, Lame Front End is not multi-threaded and only utilizes a single core of a processor. This will obviously limit performance but we should still recognize significant time savings going from the stock settings to the overclocked results. We will be encoding a WAV rip of the Blackalicious album, Blazing Arrow and converting it to MP3 using the VBR 0 quality preset.

As mentioned earlier, Lame Front End is single threaded because encoding MP3's is still done the best through this 'ancient' piece of software in a single thread. With the single thread comes higher stock CPU frequency and less of a performance gain from our overclock. The 36% performance jump is right about par for the course then, and is almost identical to the gains we saw in the single threaded Super Pi.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 is fully x64 compliant and ready and able to use every single CPU cycle our processor has available. We have changed our Photoshop benchmark to more of a standardized test configured by DriverHeaven.net. Their Photoshop benchmark utilizes 15 filters and effects on an uncompressed 109MB .JPG image that will test not only the CPU but also the memory subsystem of our test bench. Each portion of the benchmark is timed and added together for a final time that is compared below.

Similar to the other single threaded results, Photoshop CS4 is showing about a 38% increase in performance in the overclocked setup. This seems to fall in line with the other single threaded applications but it was our understanding that Photoshop was multi-threaded. It could also just not be benefitting as much from the CPU overclock as the other programs like Cinebench and DivX which are right up around the 50% mark.

We all know what WinRAR is and does. It is a compression and decompression tool that has a built in benchmark, a way to tell just how fast a system can do this programs given task. We simply run the benchmark up to 500MB processed and time how long it takes.

WinRAR is definitely multi-threaded and the 49% performance increase attests to that. We almost expected greater than a 50% drop in time in WinRAR because it really does benefit from memory frequency. As it turns out, Cinebench is the percentage winner for gains by our overclock with WinRAR and DivX a close second and third.

That concludes our system benchmarks for today, the last of our standard benchmarking will come in the form of 3D and gaming. This review, however, we have done things a bit differently. Today we are going to investigate the performance scaling of HD4890's in single, dual, triple, and even quad CrossFireX configurations.