Benchmarking Tualatin Processors on
the Asus P2B Series
Our projects to modify Asus P2B
Series
mainboards for improved Tualatin processor compatibility have been
quite successful, so we decided to run performance benchmarks and
publish the results. Unfortunately, selecting benchmarking software
proved to be somewhat problematic as we found that some of the more
popular freeware benchmarking applications did not appear to utilise
both processors on our dual processor systems, and others did not
produce consistent results between runs on the same hardware
configuration. We therefore decided to run several benchmarking
applications on each hardware configuration, publish all results, and
allow readers to draw their own conclusions.
The applications used were:
All tests were run under Windows XP
SP1 on an Asus P2B-DS revision 1.06 D03 mainboard modified as described
on this site, BIOS version 1014 beta 3 (with Tualatin tB1 microcode
added), running one or two Tualatin processors and a single 256MB
Corsair PC150 DIMM set to 143Mhz (CAS 2) in the BIOS. We also tested
single and dual Katmai PIII processors for comparison purposes. We
recorded only
processor and ram benchmark results.
Processors used were:
- 1 x Tualatin
Celeron 1AGhz SL5ZF
tA1 256KB (10x multiplier)
- 2 x Katmai PIII
450Mhz SL35D
kC0 512KB (4.5x multiplier)
- 2 x Tualatin
PIII-S 1.4Ghz SL6BY
tB1 512KB (10.5x multiplier)
- 2 x
Tualatin PIII-S QEL8ES tA1 512KB (4.0x - 9.5x multipliers - these
processors are engineering samples)
The author has upgraded processors on his
main P2B-DS system three times since the system was originally
purchased, and we found WinTune benchmark results for previous
processors in the archives. The following graph illustrates the
performance improvements gained as a result of these upgrades.
The children's P2B-S systems were also upgraded.
But Mom insisted on a new Pentium 4... bad choice!
On to the benchmark results....
Single Processor Benchmarks
Dual Processor Benchmarks
Last updated December 28th, 2003
by p2b@sympatico.ca