The “Friendly Competition”
ASRock’s P67-based LGA 1156 solution is the midpoint between two generations of technology, so it makes sense to compare it to both sides. First, we brought out one of our most recent P55 motherboards, ASRock’s P55 Extreme4, to compare P55 to P67 chipset performance with all remaining parts identical.
Keeping with a single brand of motherboard should help maintain consistency between tests, and the P55 Extreme4 is the best ASRock product we’ve seen to date.
Yet, nobody will buy an upgrade motherboard if they believe their older LGA 1156-based CPU has lost its performance relevance. ASRock’s P67-Extreme6 allows us determine how much better the new chipset can perform when paired with a second-gen Core CPU.
With previous-generation and next-generation platforms setting the boundaries for comparing ASRock’s new cross-generational motherboard, we needed to find two processors that would make this a fair test. The only next-generation CPU we had on hand was Core i5-2500K quad-core chip, and fairness forced us to dig deep into our parts bin to find a similar-spec LGA 1156 model.
Both processors were set to identical clock speeds, yet getting there on the older CPU was no easy task. To put it frankly, this particular Core i5-750 is a dud, and keeping it stable at 4.00 GHz required high core voltage levels and low temperatures. The only results that you might consider unfair as a result are the power consumption numbers, and we’ll keep that in mind when discussing efficiency.
