PCMark Vantage
Here, the Extreme 4 scores a little better. Being that the Extreme 4 uses a Realtek ALC892 Codec versus the P55A’s Realtek ALC889, it could account for the differences in music scores. It’s enough to score better in the end.
SANDRA CPU Math and Multimedia
Straight out of the gate, the Extreme 4 and P55A-UD3 fight over fractions of a point. The Extreme 4 pulls up and stays just ahead. Let’s see what else goes down.
Cinebench R11.5
Matching CPU features and settings in the BIOS don’t usually offer too much difference. If these were full Auto settings, the GIGABYTE would pull ahead by another .01 for each.
Heaven Demo (DX 10)
Well, this is kind of a first. Even after re-running the benchmark four times, the average was just off by fractions. So, the results are rounded off.
Games: Crysis Warhead & Bad Company 2
Either platforms work for gaming. Nothing seems out of the ordinary and both seem equally accepting of any PCI Express 2.0 card on the test bench.
I/O Motherboard Performance
What about all those ports on the back of the motherboard? In order to measure USB and SATA performance, I used CrystalDiskMark to test sequential read and write performance. And, SANDRA was used to test the LAN, or network performance.
There are no surprises here. Neither of the test platforms utilize a PLX chip in board design to assist the flow of data like some ASUS and even ECS boards out there. Therefore, the results are very close to one another.