ASRock P55 Extreme4 Review

Testing Methods

With the exception of ATTO, which we use to measure the performance of a motherboard's SATA controllers, all of our benchmarks use real applications to show you how the board performs in the tasks you'll use it for.

We test with our own Media Benchmarks suite which can be downloaded so you can test your own system. It uses a combination of Gimp image editing, H.264 encoding with Handbrake and multi-tasking with 7-zip file compression combined with HD video playback. Finally, for our game testing we benchmark the board running Crysis and record the minimum and average frame rates.

Our benchmarks include stable overclocked results too, so you can gauge how much performance potential there is in the motherboard, and how much value this adds to your purchase.

Test Setup:

Motherboards:

• ASRock P55 Extreme4 (Intel P55)
  
• Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 (Intel P55)
  
• ASRock H55M Pro (Intel H55)
  
• Asus P7H57D-V Evo (Intel H57)
  
• Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H (Intel H55)
  
• Asus P7P55M (Intel P55)
  
• ASRock P55M Pro (Intel P55)
  
• Biostar TP55 (Intel P55)

Common Components:

• Intel Core i5-750 (45nm, 8MB L3 cache, 20x133MHz; 2.66GHz, Turbo Mode and Intel power saving states left at BIOS default settings)
  
• 4GB DDR3 1,600MHz CL8 at motherboard Auto settings
  
• ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB
  
• PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750W PSU
  
• Seagate 7200.11 1TB SATA hard disk
  
• Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB
  
• Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
  
• ATI Catalyst 10.5 WHQL

Overclocked Settings:

• ASRock P55 Extreme4 - 4GHz, 200MHz Base Clock, 20x multiplier, 1,600MHz dual-channel DDR3 memory at 8-8-8-24-1T
  
• Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 - 4.1GHz, 205MHz Base Clock, 20x multiplier, 1,640MHz dual-channel DDR3 memory at 9-9-9-24-74-1T.
  
• ASRock H55M Pro - 3.2-3.36GHz, 160MHz Base Clock, 20-21x mulitplier, 1,600MHz dual-channel DDR3 memory at 9-9-9-24-74-1T.
  
• Asus P7H57D-V Evo - 4.13GHz CPU, 207MHz base clock, 20x multiplier, 1,656MHz dual-channel DDR3 memory at 9-9-9-24-74-1T.
  
• Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H: 4.1GHz CPU, 205MHz base clock, 20x multiplier, 1,6400MHz dual-channel DDR3 memory at 10-9-9-25-74-1T.