SANDRA Mathematical and Multimedia
Pulling a double shift here, SANDRA has proven an invaluable asset to testing generations of processors which you can experience by downloading the Lite version. Let’s take a look.
After several runs to be certain, the P55H-AK starts off pushing the capable Clarkdale processor especially in the Multimedia test. This probably due to some slight BIOS tuning. A promising start to say the least.
x.264 Encoding 3.0
This one is more for the media folks who want to know if the platform is all gaming or not. As you can see, it’s just as nimble as its competitor when it comes to being a video editing machine.
Unigine Heaven 2.0 Demo
With the exception of the Score, the average frame rates were too close to call in reality. The P55A-UD6 is a spirited platform. To see the P55H-AK keeping up is a testament to it’s build quality.
Games: Crysis and Bad Compan 2 (1920 x 1200)
There’s a small difference in performance here. The graphic card seems to have a little more room to stretch out on the P55H-AK. At these resolutions, I’ll take anything extra I can get.
IO Feature Performance
If you recall, many budget boards share the PCIe bus with certain features than can slow things down. Â The chances of someone using all these features simultaneously are pretty slim though. Nonetheless, I’ve been a bit curious how this would affect performance. To show you the benefits of the extra PCIe lanes in the P55H-AK, I tossed in a second ZOTAC Geforce GTX 280 video card and tested these features while running a game benchmark.
At first, I was expecting a lot more difference. As you can see, USB 3.0 took the largest performance hit more so than SATA3. The SATA2 scores are hauling butt thanks to the Kingston 128GB V+ SSDNow drive. In defense of the UD6, there was no noticeable change in frame rates. Fortunately, the AK remains full speed at all times in any scenario, realistic or not.
Power Consumption
Hey, it’s a gaming board. Power consumption tends to go right out the window even in power saving mode. Using an SLI set of GPUs also tends to get a little hungry even when idle. These aren’t horrible numbers though. We’ve seen much higher consumption on the X58 platforms.