Test Method and Results
To thoroughly test a motherboard, a method to the madness has to be devised. Thus, SISOFT SANDRA was used to test CPU, Memory Bandwidth, and all Input/Output features like USB 2.0 and all SATA functions. Futuremark Vantage, Crysis, Farcry 2, World at War, Left 4 Dead, and Mirror’s Edge follow up with expected 3D performance.
First off, we lead with our favorite batch of synthetic benchmarks…
3DMark Vantage
It’s not surprising to see that the three cousins in our test put out pretty much identical numbers in a synthetic benchmark such as 3DMark Vantage. This only proves that the implementation and BIOS are in check. It is worth noting though that the ECS board does edge out the two other boards ever so slightly, but it’s nothing to get all hot and bothered about.
SANDRA CPU Benchmarks
The system’s overall results here are just about identical with any other X58 platform. Differences will depend on whether or not your board runs the CPU just a little faster like with our highly praised ASUS ROG Rampage II Gene X58 board.
SANDRA Memory Bandwidth
As if there wasn’t enough memory bandwidth on hand in stock form, we had to go and add a little overclocking love for the benchmark elites. That’s almost 32 GB/s for those that want to see the Core i7’s memory controller in action.
Input/Output Benchmarks
Thanks to the very capable and affordable Kingston V-Series SSD, we can finally add a little sustanance to the otherwise, uneventful hard drive IO tests here. Granted SSDs are essentially SATA, but it’s good to see regular and future results as well as confirm there aren’t any incompatibilities or strange performance anomalies.