Asus P7H57D-V EVO; Poked, Prodded and Tested

Performance – Subsystems
Motherboard performance is not simply a measure of how fast you can overclock or indeed how many FPS it will get you in your favorite game. We feel that it is a combination of the subsystems combined with how well it handles your CPU, RAM and add-in boards.  As such we cover performance of these items in our testing.

Memory
Memory performance is very important in a motherboard. This is even truer now that most CPUs have an internal memory controller. These are usually less affected by the actual speed of the memory as they are any issues in latency, skew and tracing on the board. For the most part Asus has this area firmly in hand. They typically can outperform the competition in terms of stock and overclocked memory performance. For our testing we use Sisoft Sandra and Everest Memory test.

   
Everest Memory Test - Stock / Overclocked / With GTX 285
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The Asus P7H57D-V EVO had roughly the same performance as the other H5x boards we have tested.

Drive Performance
The ability of a motherboard to pull data from your disk drive is another important aspect of system performance.

   
Everest HDD Test - Stock / Overclocked / With GTX 285
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Not much to see here really. The SSD performance on the SATA II controller is what we have come to expect. The SATA 3.0 performance is interesting, but as we are only able to test an HDD on this new interface we still do not see performance that would make this new standard worthwhile.


Audio
As we mentioned above, we are seeing motherboard makers putting I higher-quality audio products onto their boards. But are these new CODECs able to make a difference? That is something that is important to know as if they are not then you are paying extra for something that is not going to be any benefit to you in the end as you will need to spend extra to get sound that is acceptable.

Audio performance is both a subjective and objective experience. With the Asus P7H57D-V EVO we find that the Realtek ALC889 audio chipset does not hinder performance in anyway and also provides decent audio quality. I would not call the audio “High-End” but I would say that it accurately reproduces most sounds, and for the mainstream user this will be more than good enough.