EVGA X58 3X SLI Core i7 Motherboard
Test System and SANDRA Tests
Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for either DDR2-1066 (AMD) with 5,5,5,15 timings, DDR3-1333 with 7,7,7,20 timings (Intel Core 2), or DDR3-1066 with 7,7,7,20 timings (Intel Core i7). The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
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| System 1: Core i7 Extreme 965 (3.2GHz - Quad-Core) Intel DX58SO Asus P6T Deluxe Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme (X58 Express Chipset) 3x1GB Qimonda DDR3-1066 CL 7-7-7-20 - DDR3-1066 GeForce GTX 280 On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio WD150 "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows Vista Ultimate NVIDIA Forceware v180.43 DirectX Redist (August 2008) |
System 2: Core 2 Extreme QX9770 (3.2GHz - Quad-Core) Asus P5E3 Premium (X48 Express Chipset) Asus Striker II Extreme (nForce 790i Ultra SLI) ** High Res Game Tests Only 4x1GB Corsair DDR3-1800 CL 7-7-7-20 - DDR3-1333 GeForce GTX 280 On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio WD150 "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows Vista Ultimate NVIDIA Forceware v180.43 DirectX Redist (August 2008) |
System 3: Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DQ6 2x2GB Corsair PC2-8500 GeForce GTX 280 WD150 "Raptor" HD Windows Vista Ultimate |
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We continued our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2009, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2009 suite on the test motherboards (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multi-Media, and Memory).
In these quick synthetic benchmarks, as you'll note in the graphs, the EVGA X58 3X SLI is right on top of the Intel board, in terms of CPU performance. However, we did notice a slight variance in memory bandwidth, which isn't that surprising. X58 Express chipset-based boards and BIOSes are still very much being tuned from virtually all the major manufacturers. You'll likely see these variances tighten up a bit more as things mature. That said, let's journey on with respect to the numbers and see where the rest of the chips fall for this new board from EVGA.
