Eight P35-DDR2 Motherboards Compared

Performance Summary

Gaming is one place where performance differences are really visible, so let's consider the average frame rate differences for all three games. The average frame rate for each board is divided by that of the slowest board to calculate a percentage difference.

The P35 Express boards showed a typical gaming performance lead of around 5% compared to the tested P965 Express board. Asus's P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP took the largest lead at 6.73%, but this particular board is also overclocked by 0.24%. Adjusting for the clock speed difference, Asus still leads the slowest board by 6.48%, and its closest competitor by 0.37%.

The Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP took a small lead in game performance, but applications are also important. The encoding time for each board was added from every test, and dividing the slowest combined encoding time into that of the other boards shows the performance difference as a positive percentage.

Several P35 Express chipset boards tied for equal encoding performance, with the P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP taking the most significant P35 loss. Only the 650i comparison board did worse, though the spread between best and worst was barely more than one percent.

The P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP wins the synthetic tests, but its 0.97% lead drops to 0.73% when taking into account its 0.24% CPU overclock. "Fixing" the score puts the P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP in the middle of the pack, with MSI's P35 Platinum leading.