|ASUS P9X79 WS LGA2011 Workstation Motherboard|
|Reviews - Featured Reviews: Motherboards|
|Written by David Ramsey|
|Tuesday, 17 January 2012|
Page 9 of 17
PassMark PerformanceTest 7.0
The PassMark PerformanceTest allows you to objectively benchmark a PC using a variety of different speed tests and compare the results to other computers. PassMark comprises a complete suite of tests for your computer, including CPU tests, 2D and 3D graphics tests, disk tests, memory tests, and even tests to determine the speed of your system's optical drive. PassMark tests support Hyper-Threading and systems with multiple CPUs, and allow you to save benchmark results to disk (or to export them to HTML, text, GIF, and BMP formats).
Knowledgeable users can use the Advanced Testing section to alter the parameters for the disk, network, graphics, multitasking, and memory tests, and created individual, customized testing suites. But for this review I used only the built-in CPU tests, which aren't configurable. The CPU tests comprise a number of different metrics. The first three I'll look at are integer performance, floating point performance, and a benchmark that finds prime numbers.
Overclocking the system helps quite a bit here, picking the scores up by 15% in integer performance and 16% in floating point performance. Although the smaller bars in the Prime benchmark make the difference less apparent, overclocking adds 17% to the score there.
SSE stands for "Streaming SIMD Extensions", and describes instructions that handle multiple chunks of data per instruction (SIMD = Single Instruction Multiple Data). SSE instructions work on single-precision floating point data and are typically used in graphical computations. SSE was Intel's response to AMD's "3D Now", which itself was a response to Intel's MMX instructions. Don't you love competition? Again we see virtually identical scores for the three ASUS motherboards.
The Compress and String benchmarks are both integer-based, and overclocking the P9X79 WS brings the scores up by 15% and 12% in these tests.
But enough with the synthetic benchmarks; let's move onto some more real-world applications.