Testing – Gaming
Crysis:
Though it has been out well over two years, I still find Crysis the best benchmark for gaming systems. I don’t know of any game that puts so much stress on the CPU and memory, and still is very VGA intensive. It will find those system instabilities not found by Prime95, Sandra Burn-in, and the Futuremark series, especially in memory. It is my favorite utility for testing overclocks. I used the Crysis Benchmark Test by Boris Vergiza, settings were: CPU Benchmark, DX10, High, AA x 2, 1280 x 1024.
PT Boats: Knights of the Sea:
PT Boats prefers a strong CPU and powerful video card. It has some tough camera angle changes that really affect the low FPS scores. I used the standalone performance test, settings were High, AA x 2, 1280 x 1024.
Call of Juarez:
Call of Juarez requires a strong system for any kind of decent frame rate. I used the standalone demo benchmark, settings were: High, AA x 2, 1280 x 1024.
Great review, but you forgot one important thing. You didn't mention anything about the bridge (PLX) chip and how it doesn’t provide extra DMI bus bandwidth, which can “potentially” bottleneck anything running off the P55 chipset, ie; anything running of X1's, your OS drive, etc.
Gigabyte's USB 3.0/Sata III solution is really the only viable one, as every other USB 3.0/Sata III mobo maker uses the PLX chip.
Great review, i have same mobo, with I7 in Windows 2003 server 32 bits, i experiment a poor perfomance of this system, what can cause this?, i have a raid 0 with 2 sata of 1 Tera, and 8 Gb RAM. I have windows 2003 r2 32 bits for exchange server 2003 do not support 64 bits 🙁
Note that the P7P55D-E (non-pro) and lower boards in this family do NOT have the PLX chip solution for USB 3 and SATA 3. For those boards, USB 3 and SATA 3 share PCIE bandwidth.