CPU Performance Results

We spent a couple of days with the ASUS M5A97-EVO before beginning our performance testing, running various configurations and CPUs, and checking hardware compatibility. We verified our power consumption numbers using various different power supplies, and played a few hours of games with some members of the TPU community to get an overall feel for the board, and to verify stability. Once completed, we tore down the system, mounted our Noctua cooler, and put the board through the paces. We noticed no compatibility issues, however, we must say that the performance results that follow are not completely indicative of the ASUS M5A97 EVO's performance, as Phenom II technology, at this point, is fairly dated. With that said, on to the results!

SuperPi

SuperPI serves as our memory-focused benchmark, being highly single-threaded. Although the M5A97 EVO ended up on the bottom of the pile, the results are fairly good for the Phenom II platform.

wPrime

wPrime is much more CPU-focused, but memory plays its role as well. In this test, the numbers were much closer, but still slower than even the P7P55D-E PRO's results, which is more in line with what we expect from the Phenom II 1100T.

WinRAR

A new addition to our motherboard benchmarking suite is the built-in benchmark that is part of the WinRAR software suite. In this test, the ASUS M5A97 EVO put up good numbers, however, memory performance of the Phenom II does hold the M5A97 EVO back a fair bit.

AIDA64

We employed AIDA64's memory bench to highlight memory bandwidth. We isolate the write performance metric as it serves as a good indicator of overall memory performance. Again the M5A97 EVO ended up on the bottom of the pile, but still managed to show fairly decent numbers when compared with other Phenom IIs.

HandBrake Encoding

Handbrake is used for encoding testing, and provided results much similar to the previous benchmarks, with the ASUS M5A97 EVO beating our previously best result. Because Handbrake uses the CPU, memory, and hard drives fairly extensively, the ASUS M5A97 EVO beating the numbers from the other boards was something we did not fully expect, as the previous results have been a bit mixed.

CineBench Encoding

In Cinebench, the ASUS M5A97 EVO allows the Phenom II 1100T to shine, with its six real cores beating the four cores plus Hyperthreading of the I7 870 used on the P7P55D-E PRO. The GPU numbers were impacted by the lower memory performance of the Phenom II platform, but that doesn't seem to affect the CPU numbers too much.