Table of Contents:
I know that this review is a little longer than some of my others but now it’s time to see if all of Gigabyte’s featured have paid off. What good are features if they don’t add up to performance? This is what sets an enthusiast level board apart. If the performance isn’t there then all of the features in the world won’t add up to sales.
Our test bench was set up with this board, Intel’s 3960x processor, 8 gigs of quad channel DDR3 1600MHz memory and an XFX HD 6950 1 gig video card. We put this board through a full battery of tests to stress every part of these boards and give an idea of what the overall performance would be with similar hardware. Installation and setup of the board was very simple and straight forward.
Let me start by saying that with the X79 boards that we’ve tested so far this board has given us the highest scores in most of our benchmarks. In some of our tests the difference was pretty apparent. In particular we got nearly a 300 point difference in 3D Mark 11 and an increase of .63 in Cinebench. This board has shown that it was made to be pushed and it’s no doubt that this is exactly what Gigabyte was going for.
