ASRock Penryn1600SLIX3-Wifi Motherboard Review

System Benchmarks

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.


Results: A 22% increase in SuperPI 32M is noted going from 2400Mhz to 3240Mhz on the Q6600 and ASRock Penryn1600SLIX3-Wifi.


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, 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. 26% and 24% improvements in rendering time are noted for single-CPU and multi-CPU respectively. Not bad at all.


Sandra Memory Bandwidth & 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 version used for these tests is SiSoftware Sandra Professional Home XII.SP2c and the two benchmarks used are the Memory Bandwidth and Processor Arithmetic benchmarks. These two were chosen as one is targeted towards memory and the other the CPU, providing contrasting tests and a wide scope of results.


Results: Sandra processor arithmetic and memory bandwidth improvements were quite impressive when moving to an overclocked system. Processor arithmetic improved by between 34% and 36%, and although memory speed and all timings remained the same, a 31% improvement in bandwidth was achieved.