Intro:
Last week we brought you a preview of the ASUS
P5RD1-V Deluxe motherboard which looked specifically at
the feature set of the board including the first onboard
DirectX9 chipset for Intel. As the sample
we received was a pre production board we refrained from
publishing any information on performance as it may not
have fully represented the abilities of the shipping product.
Since then however we have received a retail sample of the
P5RD1-V (non deluxe) which is basically the same board minus
the onboard TV tuner and we’ve run it through its
paces in a number of tests.
You can read our original preview
here
Driverheaven uses custom
java scripts to display high resolution images, some software
may class these as "popups"
Before we begin looking at the performance
of the P5RD1-V we need to comment on a few things…
our original preview stated that we hoped there would be
a bios update in the future which would enable 1066fsb processors
such as the current EE P4’s. This looks unlikely currently
and so at this time support stops at 800fsb CPU’s.
We also noted the lack of DDR2 support, this is also a decision
which wont be changed in the P5RD1-V family… because
of this we are interested in seeing how the board performs
when put up against Intel’s lower price chipset the
915 which does support DDR2 and these are our comparison
results today.
Finally before we look at the comparisons,
we have slightly amended our test suite for motherboard/cpu
reviews. Our new suite will only feature game tests when
the board being tested features onboard graphics. In previous
reviews it has been the case that changing the motherboard
only results in approx 1-2% performance difference which
is well within the normal margin of error. Therefore we
are now concentrating on more general use tasks (encoding,
video playback, Zipping files etc) which are more dependant
on the Motherboard and how well it manages the CPU and other
components. We feel this will better illustrate how a new
motherboard will benefit you.
