Testing Configuration and Benchmarks Used

For our testing today, we chose to pit the ASUS Sabertooth X79 against Gigabyte’s X79-UD5 and MSI’s X79A-GD65 (8D) to see which $300 motherboard will take our Intel i7-3820 3.6GHz processor to its highest performance levels in a host of benchmarks ranging from PCMark Vantage to SiSandra 2012.  

 

CPU-Z Screenshots

 

Test System Setup

CPU

Intel i7-3820 (running at 3.6GHz, 100×36)

Motherboards

ASUS Sabertooth X79
MSI X79A-GD65 (8D)
Gigabyte X79A-UD5

Memory 

Corsair 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3-1600 Quad Channel

Solid State Drive

Western Digital Silicon Edge Blue 128GB SATA 3GB/s 

Sound Card

Onboard sound

Video Card

XFX Radeon HD 5770 512MB

CPU Cooling

Zalman CNPS12X

Video Drivers

AMD ATI Catalyst 12.1
Power Supply PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750w 

DirectX Version

DX11/ DX10 / DX9c

Operating System

Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

 

Our 64-bit test bench for the LGA 2011 Sandy Bridge-E processors includes 16 GBs of quad-channel DDR-1600 memory, an XFX Radeon HD 5770 512MB graphics card, and a Western Digital Silicon Edge Blue 128GB SATA solid state drive for storage. This configuration is based off a mid-range LGA 2011 system and focuses on evaluating the motherboard’s capabilities and less on the rest of the hardware components.

 

Benchmarks used:

– SiSoft Sandra 2012 

– CineBench 11.5 64-bit 

– Handbrake DVD compression

– 3DMark Vantage 

– 3DMark11 Professional

– Crysis 2

– Dirt 3

– PCMark Vantage

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