Everest 2006 Ultimate Edition 3.1 Performance

In order to give yet another view of platform performance and memory bandwidth, we include the latest Everest 2006 Ultimate Edition 3.1 in our benchmark mix. The Everest benchmarking suite offers several different memory performance modules, and has quickly become a standard for many hardware evaluations. For this review, we have used Everest Ultimate Edition version 3.1, which has been updated for valid Core 2 Duo/DDR2-800 testing. Our benchmark charts center on the Memory Read, Memory Write, Memory Copy, and Memory Latency tests, which should give us a good idea of how each of the motherboard-DDR2 combos stacked up.

The first Everest Ultimate Edition benchmark is the Memory Read test, and this one truly highlights the performance differences of the various DDR2 clock speeds. The usual gap between DDR2-667 and DDR2-800 is present, but we also see the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 at DDR2-1066 showing a noticeable performance jump. This is the first benchmark to display any significant advantage for the overclocked memory speed, and it will be interesting to see what kind of results the upcoming platform and gaming benchmarks show.

The Memory Write benchmarks show very little difference between the various Intel platforms and DDR2 memory speeds, leading one to believe that this function is not limited by platform or memory bandwidth, and is instead determined by the 1066 MHz CPU bus.

The Memory Copy benchmarking gets us back on track, and here the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 with DDR2-1066 memory has a noticeable performance advantage compared to the Intel 975X using DDR2-800. The only strange thing is, that the Gigabyte board with DDR2-800 provides the top score, and this particular benchmark seems to be influenced by both DDR2 clock speed and memory timings.

The Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 has placed extremely well in virtually all of the memory and subsystem benchmarking, but the memory latency scores definitely favor the Intel 975X motherboard. The results are also a function of both clock speeds and memory latency, and shows that the i975X still has some tricks up its sleeve.