When we decided to put the test bench together for X79 we wanted a system that would not only perform well but also last the test of time given that X58 has been around for some 3 years now so we saw no reason to believe that its successor, X79 would not be able to do the same.


Some of the components for our test bench were kindly donated by CORSAIR who provided the majority of components without whom we would not have been able to bring you this review so a big thanks to them. Thanks also go to MSI who donated their NVIDIA GTX560Ti.

Motherboards on test:

GIGABYTE X79-UP4

MSI X79A-GD45 8D
ASRock Extreme6 GB
GIGABYTE X79-UD3
MSI X79 Big Bang XPower II
ASRock X79 Extreme4-M
GIGABYTE X79-UD5
MSI X79A-GD65 8D



Benchmarks

Cinebench 11.5 – CPU Score
x264 HD 4.0 – 1st and 2nd pass encoding
SiSoftware SANDRA 2011 – CPU benchmarks
AIDA64 – CPU benchmarks
PCMark 7 – System Benchmark
3DMark 11 – Performance and Extreme preset
Games – Crysis 2 & DiRT3

Other Software
Core Temp 0.99.5
LinX stress Test
CPUID HWMonitor