Asus P5B Deluxe WiFi-AP Edition

Memory Performance:

Despite the random memory latency being slightly slower than its 975X brother the Asus P5B outperforms it by a few hundred MB/second. The Intel boards are dwarfed by the on-die memory controller bandwidth of the AMD Athlon 64 AM2 CPUs though.

Disk Performance:

The SATA read tests were conducted with a 74GB Western Digital Raptor using HD Tach 3.0.1.0's 8MB zone test. The USB 2.0 tests were done using an ATA133 160GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 hard drive (model number: 6L160PO) using the same 8MB zone test enclosed in an Icy Box USB 2.0 hard drive caddy. We recorded the average read speeds in all cases.

Unfortunately, during testing, both our Western Digital Raptor harddisks died so we were unable to complete the SATA harddisk benchmark. It will be added at a later date.

The ICH8R southbridge has a decent USB 2.0 performance, but is slightly slower than the top end NVIDIA and ATI chipset equivalents. Interestingly, despite running the test three times to be sure the ICH8R southbridge comes up with 0% CPU usage for USB 2.0. We delved into Intel's technical spec sheets and found nothing that was to identify an off-CPU calculation upgrade to USB 2.0 other than the addition of more ports, but there's nothing to suggest HD Tach is wrong either. The only solid conclusion we can draw from this that the USB 2.0 performance should be somewhere between ICH7R at 6% and the 0% result we obtained: "very low".