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We used the following hardware for testing of the ASUS P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP:

• Intel Core 2 E6700 processor (Socket LGA757, 2.66 GHz, two cores)
• XFX GeForce 7800 GT video card
• Western Digital WD1200JD SATA hard drive
• 2 * 1024 MB Corsair PC2-8500 memory @ 4-5-4-10/2T

The ASUS P5B Deluxe will be duking it out with our other P965-based Core 2-compatible motherboard:

• Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 (Intel P965, DDR2-800 @ 4-4-4-12/2T)

Unless ASUS has botched the design of the P5B Deluxe (which I highly doubt), then our test results ought to look more or less identical between the two motherboards. Such is the excitement in motherboard performance testing between products that sport the same chipset.

For now, here is a listing of the tests performed:

• PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004
• PC Magazine Multimedia Content Creation 2004
• RightMark Memory Analyzer
• SiSoft Sandra Memory Analyzer
• HDTach
• WinRAR
• TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding
• XviD Video Encoding
• LAME MP3 Encoding
• Rightmark Audio*
• Call of Duty
• Doom 3
• Comanche 4
• Halo
• Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
• Unreal Tournament 2004

Video drivers used were NVIDIA ForceWare version 81.98.

As a reminder ... to save you from boredom, and to save myself some time, I won't bother discussing results that don't exhibit anomalies. There is no point in stating that Product A performed the same as Products B, when that much is obvious by looking at the graph. That said, let's get on with the testing!

* The SoundMAX audio codec on the ASUS P5B Deluxe refused to let itself be tested with Rightmark Audio. I encountered similar issues with the ASUS M2N32-SLI, which also used a SoundMAX codec.