Next SiSoft Sandra:

We ran several CPU and memory specific tests through SiSoft Sandra, the first of which is a CPU arithmetic test:

Again we see only a slight difference, but in this case the ASUS has come out on top in both tests, showing a slight advantage in raw mathematical processing power.

The next test is another CPU test, testing multimedia instruction sets.

Again we see a slight advantage for the ASUS board in both tests.

The next test compares the speed of the CPU’s Cache and Memory subsystems, and the results were quite surprising.

The Foxconn board and its Intel 975X chipset are clearly much faster here, which helps to explain the performance gain the Foxconn had in the 3DMark06 CPU tests. All our tests are run twice to ensure accuracy, but we ran this one a few more times on each just to be sure as we were quite surprised at the difference.

The next benchmark from SiSoft tests the efficiency of the Multi-Core CPU by testing the bandwidth speed between the cores (higher = better), as well as the inter-core latency (lower = better).

Intercore Bandwidth

Again we see a very clear advantage for the Foxconn motherboard with an increase in bandwidth speed of around 14% over the ASUS, and the ASUS being over 30% slower in latency. This means multithreaded applications should have much better performance on the Foxconn/Intel 975X combo compared to the ASUS/nVidia combination motherboard.

The next test is memory (RAM) bandwidth.

This test shows what we were talking about in the PCMark05 test, the ASUS has quite a distinct advantage in memory speed, almost 10% faster than the Foxconn, which is a massive difference.

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