MSI P67A-GD80 Motherboard

Benchmarks

Now, of course, we get to the real meat of the matter: the testing. The P67A-GD80 has no video headers, so we’ll be skipping the evaluation of the HD 2000 graphics unit. Other than that, though, we’ll be putting this system through a thorough round of testing, so buckle up!

Note:you’ll see me talk about the i5 2300 a lot in these benchmarks; that’s because the CPU and chipset are so tightly bound in the Sandy Bridge architecture that talking about one is meaningless except in context of the other.

Test System

Test System
CPU	Intel Core i5 2300 @ 2.8GHz
Heatsink	Intel stock cooler
Motherboard	MSI P67A-GD80
Chipset	Intel P67 rev 2 (Cougar Point)
Graphics card	Sparkle GeForce GTX 465
RAM	2x4GB SuperTalent DDR3-2000 @ 1300MT/s, CL9
Sound	Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD
SSD	Crucial RealSSD 256GB SATA 6Gb/s
HDD 1	Western Digital Caviar Green 5400RPM 500GB
HDD 2	Western Digital Caviar Green 5400RPM 1.5TB
Power Supply	OCZ 750W Fatal1ty Series
Case	Silverstone Fortress FT-02
OS	Windows 7 Ultimate
Drivers	Forceware 266.58

Sandra 2011

We’ll start off with one of the most comprehensive of the bunch, SiSoftware’s Sandra.

Right out of the gate, we see some eye-raising numbers. The i5 2300 manages to smoke all comers in the Dhrystone ALU test, coming out ahead of both AMD’s Phenom II X6 1090T and the Core i7 920 from Intel’s own previous generation. The Whetstone FPU results are more modest, though the i5 2300 still manages to stay ahead of the i5 760 by a healthy margin.

The oddities continue in the multimedia tests; the i5 2300 just barely squeaks into first place in the multimedia integer test ahead of the Core 2 Quad Q9550. Things are somewhat more clear-cut in the multimedia float test, where the i5 2300 pulls far ahead of the competition.

Things are looking a little more bleak in the multi-core efficiency tests; the inter-core bandwidth test shows the Nehalem i7 CPUs pulling ahead due to their support for Hyper-Threading. The inter-core latency test comes up rather rosier though, with the i5 2300 pulling ahead of all but the i7 950 in response time.

No slouch in the efficiency department, the i5 2300 comes in just behind the Phenom II X6 1090T on the ALU power performance test, and just about even on the power efficiency ranking.

In a rather surprising upset, the i5 2300 comes in ahead of both the Phenom II X6 1090T and the i7 950 by a rather shocking margin in the cryptographic bandwidth test. Things are different in the hashing bandwidth test though, with the i5 2300 coming in behind both the 1090T and the i7 950 by a fair margin. Unsurprisingly, the i7 2600K smokes all comers in the same test.

Since all modern desktop CPUs have the memory controller on-die these days, it behooves us to test the performance on that as well. The integer and float memory bandwidth test results look nearly identical, with the Sandy Bridge controller coming in just shy of the Nehalem’s X58 controller. Especially notable is that the X58 is running in triple-channel mode–apparently buying your ram modules in threes is no longer necessary for blistering speeds!

The memory latency tests come in equally close, with the AMD 790FX barely edging out the lead. This can mainly be attributed to the much tighter timings typical of DDR2 ram, though interestingly the difference in memory clock speed seems to shave much of that advantage away.

The cache and memory test gives us a look at the aggregate bandwidth of all the memory available to the CPU, both on-die caches and RAM. Here the i5 2300 finishes neck-and-neck with the Phenom II X6 1100T.

As you can see, the Intel SATA 6.0Gbps controller doesn’t slow down this SSD at all.