7-Zip

7-Zip 4.57 was used for this benchmark and all settings were left at default except for number of passes which was set to run for 8 full passes. Only after 8 passes were the results recorded.


Just as winRAR showed, the P31 architecture does allow for very reasonable numbers.


This is where a quad core really shines and does prove that while the the p31 is older technology ASRock certainly has made it into a very decent system.


PCMark 04 (Virus Scanning)

All options were left at their default values.

This test was chosen as it doesn’t just show the power of the CPU, rather it underlines the power and efficiency of the system as a whole. More importantly and unlike the previous tests which stressed mainly the RAM and CPU (and thus the P31 chipset) it also stresses the ICH7 controller as information is passed across the bus from the hard drive to the memory and cpu and back again.


These are quite good numbers and while the ICH7 may be older technology it certainly is not bottlenecking the system either. Of course this test has not been optimized for a multi-core system and this does explain the less than sterling result of the quad core Q6600.