Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective UEFI menus and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then formatted the SSD and installed Windows 7 Home Premium. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Then we disabled Auto-Updating and Windows Defender, installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, cleared temp and prefetch data, and ran the tests.
We outfitted our motherboards with an Intel Core i7-3770K, 8GB of Kingston HyperX DDR3-1600MHz memory, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX discrete graphics card, and an OCZ Vertex 4 SSD. We also went with a Corsair H55 Hydro liquid cooler over air cooling.
Here are some baseline test scores for the three boards: