Test System

Initial Setup

Installation of the board proved trouble-free, and a big part of that is ASUS's ROG I/O plate design. The soft padding on one side is really a treat to use, with no tabs sticking out that might inadvertently lead to cut fingers during installation. With the board in place, the first boot with just two sticks was quick and easy. The Corsair memory used for testing includes an XMP profile, which the board booted with perfectly, including after adding the second pair of DIMMs to the board. However, this lead to the CPU's Turbo feature being disabled, affecting performance.



Once tested with Memtest86+ 4.0, and a minor CPU voltage adjustment (dropping the auto 1.2 V to a pretested 1.1 V manually), the OS was installed without any issues. Leaving voltages on "AUTO" provides more than ample voltage for the processor used, so this adjustment was neccesary to keep CPU temperature in check. After installing all the software and drivers included on the CD, the fun really began.

SuperPi

Super Pi, while being a single-threaded app, is quite useful for measuring CPU & memory performance. The Gene completely demolished the P7H55-M PRO, being able to support the Dominator's XMP profile.

wPrime

wPrime serves as a CPU computation benchmark. Default settings in Vista and Windows 7 only run one thread, but a quick adjustment to the advanced settings lets us make full use of the CPU. The results speak for themselves, the Gene at stock with XMP profile enabled failed to meet the P7H55's performance, but only due to Turbo mode being disabled.

3DMark Vantage

Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage is one of our two 3D tests, and once again, the Gene proved to be the winner. What's more interesting here is that although the Gene had a lower CPU score due to Turbo being disabled, its optimization for gamers really let the HD 5870 used for comparison fly.

Metro 2033

Metro 2033 has become yet another 3D title that heavily loads even the most capable machines. It is so demanding that even without Turbo, the Gene at stock was on-par with the P7H55-M PRO.

HDTune Pro

HDTune Pro serves as a storage and drive controller benchmark. I wasn't expecting much difference here, as I had planned to also test large file transfers as well, but there was virtually no difference between them.