Memory Performance:

Everest synthetic memory read performance on the Maximus Extreme is excellent, far better than the DDR3-based Gigabyte X38T-DQ6 board and even the Formula is better too. Despite this, the older Abit P35 board still out performs the Formula and that's another DDR2 board too.

In Sandra the story is a little bit different: the Extreme is closer in performance to the Gigabyte X38T-DQ6 while the Maximus Formula and Gigabyte X38-DS5 are almost neck and neck. Again, however, the Abit IP35 Pro still performs better than expected for a DDR2 board with a cheaper chipset.

Sandra memory latency on the Extreme is significantly lower than the rest of the boards though, which is impressive even though we mirrored the same 7-7-7-20-1T at 1,333MHz memory speed and timings as the X38T-DQ6 board which somehow delivers underwhelming performance in comparison.

Disk Performance:

The SATA read tests were conducted with a 74GB Western Digital Raptor using HD Tach 3.0.1.0's 8MB zone test. We recorded the average read speeds in all cases.



SATA and eSATA performance are on par with the other boards. Obviously due to a lack of eSATA functionality, the Maximus Formula was omitted from eSATA testing.