| X79 Express Motherboard Performance Comparison |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Motherboards | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by David Ramsey | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wednesday, 23 November 2011 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
X79 Express Motherboard Performance ComparisonAs part of the Sandy Bridge Extreme CPU launch, Benchmark Reviews received several new X79 Express motherboards to test. Each motherboard's aimed at a different audience and has different features. In this article I'll compare the stock and overclocked performance of each motherboard to see if there are any significant differences. Today we have the Intel DX79SI motherboard, as well as the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe and Sabertooth X79 TUF motherboards. Intel makes no secret of the audience for their DX79SI motherboard: it's for "champion gamers and performance enthusiasts who live to push their systems WAY beyond the limits." ASUS claims the Sabertooth X79 TUF is "...born for pursuing the preeminent stability, all-round compatibility, and extreme durability.", and that the P9X79 Deluxe is "Absolute Performance on Intel X79 Platform.", a somewhat generic claim. 
Since all three motherboards are based on Intel's X79 chipset, performance at stock clock speeds should be very similar, although differences can occur. The differentiation will likely be features and price. Full Disclosure: The product samples used in this article have been provided by Intel and ASUS. X79 Express ChipsetIf you look at the block diagrams of the Z68 and X79 chipsets side by side, the X79 seems functionally identical to the Z68, except that it lacks the digital display support and Intel Smart Response Technology. The lack of the latter is disappointing, since our tests with Intel Smart Response Technology showed that its use of an SSD as an intelligent cache to a hard drive could dramatically improve storage performance. Perhaps to make up for this, the X79 does permit overclocking via raising the base clock (BCLK) frequency, something that's almost impossible on the previous Sandy Bridge chipsets since most of the other clocks on the board were derived from the base clock, and raising it more than a few MHz would make the entire board unstable. 
As with the Z68 and earlier P67 chipsets, there are 14 USB 2.0 ports and 6 SATA ports, of which only two are SATA 6G. Notably missing is Intel's "Light Peak" (aka "Thunderbolt"), which has been used as Intel's excuse for not supporting SuperSpeed USB 3.0. And it's really odd that only two of the SATA ports are SATA 6G, since 6G devices are becoming more common, especially among SSDs. For a cutting-edge platform, this is impossible to justify. At least AMD gives you a full six SATA 6G ports. Aside from supporting LGA2011 processors such as the Sandy Bridge Extreme 3960X, the main new feature of the X79 chipset is its support for quad-channel memory, which results in enormous memory bandwidth improvements as we'll see later in this article. It can also directly support single, dual, and triple-channel memory, with performance exceeding existing dual and triple channel systems. Motherboard Feature ComparisonThe three motherboards I used in this test have different sets of features, which I've summarized in the table below.
All of these X79 boards are high-end products with enthusiast features like the ability to recover from a bad BIOS flash and solid capacitors, but the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe is obviously the fanciest: it has the most USB 3.0 ports, has the fanciest audio, a very elaborate power system, and all the other bells and whistles like diagnostic LEDs and POST code displays, as well as ASUS' dedicated "TPU" and "EPU" processors to help manage overclocking and power usage. It does however dispense with the legacy PCI slot, so those of you with a strong emotional attachment to your old Sound Blaster cards should look elsewhere. Both ASUS boards also benefit from very elaborate and finely-adjustable digital power systems ("DIGI+") as well as SSD caching and extra SATA 6G ports. The Intel DX79SI's relatively stingy 6 SATA ports, with only two SATA 6G, puts it at a disadvantage. Motherboard Testing MethodologyFor this comparison, I used the Intel Core i7-3960X at stock and overclocked speeds on each motherboard. The same video card, hard drive, and memory were used in all cases. For overclock testing I ran the benchmarks at the highest stable overclock I was able to achieve on each motherboard. Intel X79 Express Test Platforms
Benchmark Applications
Since I'm using the same video card, hard disk, memory, processor, and even CPU cooler in all platforms, the motherboards are the only things that can affect the performance. Keep this in mind as you review the benchmark results in the following sections. Overclocking ResultsOverclocking LGA 1155 Sandy Bridge CPUs can be frustrating: since most system clocks are derived from the base clock, overclocking by increasing BLCK is all but impossible, as more than a few MHz increase will render your system too unstable. Multiplier overclocking-- that is, specifying how high the CPU's "turbo" multiplier should go under load-- works well, but you must have a "K" series CPU and the correct motherboard to fully utilize this mechanism. The Sandy Bridge Extreme CPUs and the X79 chipset remove these restrictions. Still, turbo multiplier overclocking has the advantage of being fast and easy to do, without having to worry about the rest of your system. Also, this allows the processor to clock down to stock speeds at idle, reducing power usage and heat output; raising the BCLK keeps things overclocked all the time. When you overclock a Sandy Bridge (regular or Extreme) CPU by increasing the turbo multiplier, you can do it on a per-core or all-cores basis. The former allows higher overclocks when fewer cores are used; the latter runs all cores at the same speed. I prefer to see the highest speed at which I can run all cores under load, so I chose the all-cores method. The overclocking results varied on each motherboard, and probably don't represent the best possible results, as we were limited by our schedule as well as the fact that the only available cooler was Intel's High Performance Liquid Cooling System RTS2011LC. The Asetek-sourced cooler uses a standard thickness 120mm radiator with a single LED-lit fan, which Intel rates at 74CFM. The glowing blue-lit fan is pretty and very quiet (frankly I think the CFM rating is optimistic), but I needed more for the overclocking runs, so I replaced the stock fan with two high-speed Delta AFC1212D fans, rated at 113CFM airflow each, in a push-pull arrangement. While this setup is very loud it does move quite a lot of air through the radiator! The Intel DX79SI board was saddled with a beta BIOS (of which you're reminded with a large BETA on the display every time you boot the board), and unfortunately I wasn't able to achieve any reasonable overclock with the board (I don't think 200MHz counts as "reasonable"). This was disappointing since the DX79SI has an auto-overclocking feature Intel calls the "DX79SI Overclocking Assistant", which seems much more elaborate than the various auto-overclocking features built into other boards. I'll be interested to see how well this feature works when a stable BIOS is released. I was able to achieve significant overclocks on both ASUS motherboards. On the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe, I got to 4.6GHz under load: 
On the ASUS Sabertooth X79 TUF, I made it to 4.8GHz: 
The ASUS Motherboards have detailed power phase controls that control VDROOP and allow you to specify current usage as well as voltage. All I needed to do to reach these overclock was set most of the power phase controls to "high" or "extreme", and then set the multiplier. While these overclocks were stable throughout my benchmark runs, the very high voltage (1.52V) resulted in CPU temperatures that exceeded 80 degrees Centigrade in a few runs, which is higher than you'd want to maintain for any length of time. I think with a better cooler and more time I could possibly break 5GHz and get the voltage down a little, too. Surprisingly, CPU temperatures were significantly higher on the P9X79 Deluxe, which is why the overclock is a little lower on that board. I think with more time to experiment with the power controls I could have lowered the temperature and brought the overclocking up to the level of the Sabertooth. SiSoft Sandra Memory BandwidthSiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. It's available in five versions, ranging from the free "Lite" version to the Sandra Enterprise version. Sandra fully supports and exploits multi-processor and multi-core systems, NUMA memory, Hyper-Threading, and MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, and FMA instructions. It comprises a massive suite of test and reporting features...but the one I'm interested in is the memory bandwidth test: SiSoft's memory bandwidth test provides individual and aggregate scores across a variety of memory operations. For this test I'm reporting the aggregate score. Does the new quad-channel memory system really make that much of a difference? 
And the answer is yes...yes it does. But the Sandy Bridge Extreme memory controller has even more up its sleeve: although not shown on this chart, the Intel Core i7-3960X turns in better dual-channel memory bandwidth than a Core i7-2600K, and better triple-channel bandwidth than a Core i7-980X. AIDA64 Extreme Edition TestsAIDA64 is a full 64-bit benchmark and test suite utilizing MMX, 3DNow! and SSE instruction set extensions, and will scale up to 32 processor cores. An enhanced 64-bit System Stability Test module is also available to stress the whole system to its limits. For legacy processors all benchmarks and the System Stability Test are available in 32-bit versions as well. Additionally, AIDA64 adds new hardware to its database, including 300 solid-state drives. On top of the usual ATA auto-detect information the new SSD database enables AIDA64 to display flash memory type, controller model, physical dimensions, and data transfer performance data. AIDA64 v1.00 also implements SSD-specific SMART disk health information for Indilinx, Intel, JMicron, Samsung, and SandForce controllers. All of the benchmarks used in this test— Queen, Photoworxx, ZLib, hash, and AES— rely on basic x86 instructions, and consume very little system memory while also being aware of Hyper-Threading, multi-processors, and multi-core processors. Of all the tests in this review, AIDA64 is the one that best isolates the processor's performance from the rest of the system. While this is useful in that it more directly compares processor performance, readers should remember that virtually no "real world" programs will mirror these results. 
The Queen and Photoworxx tests are synthetic benchmarks that iterate the function many times and over-exaggerate what the real-world performance would be like. The Queen benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and misprediction penalties of the CPU. It does this by finding possible solutions to the classic queen problem on a chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. Like the Queen benchmark, the Photoworxx tests for penalties against pipeline architecture. The synthetic Photoworxx benchmark stresses the integer arithmetic and multiplication execution units of the CPU and also the memory subsystem. Due to the fact that this test performs high memory read/write traffic, it cannot effectively scale in situations where more than two processing threads are used, so quad-core processors with Hyper-Threading have no real advantage. The AIDIA64 Photoworxx benchmark performs the following tasks on a very large RGB image:
The ASUS boards are neck-and-neck at stock speeds, a phenomenon we'll see repeated through the remainder of this review. The Intel board with its beta BIOS trails very slightly behind. 
Here is something we'll see occasionally on other tests: despite being clocked 200MHz lower than the Sabertooth, the P9X79 Deluxe turns in a better overclocked score on the Hash benchmark. 
Intel's Clarksdale and subsequent CPUs have dominated the AES test due to their Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (AES-NI), which dramatically accelerate AES code. The Sabertooth wins here, with stock-clocked results about 10% better than the Intel DX79SI. Surprisingly, overclocks don't help this benchmark much. Let's move on to the PCMark Vantage benchmark. PCMark Vantage TestsPCMark Vantage is an objective hardware performance benchmark tool for PCs running 32- and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7. It's well suited for benchmarking any type of Microsoft Windows Vista/7 PC: from multimedia home entertainment systems and laptops, to dedicated workstations and high-end gaming rigs. Benchmark Reviews has decided to use a few select tests from the suite to simulate real-world processor usage in this article. Our tests were conducted on 64-bit Windows 7, with results displayed in the chart below. TV and Movies Suite
Gaming Suite*
Music Suite
* EDITOR'S NOTE: Hopefully our readers will carefully consider how relevant PCMark Vantage is as a "real-world" benchmark, since many of the tests rely on unrelated hardware components. For example, per the FutureMark PCMark Vantage White Paper document, Gaming test #2 weighs the storage device for 100% of the test score. In fact, according to PCMark Vantage the video card only impacts 23% of the total gaming score, but the CPU represents 37% of the final score. As our tests in this article (and many others) have already proven, gaming performance has a lot more to do with the GPU than the CPU, and especially more than the hard drive or SSD (which is worth 38% of the final gaming performance score). 
The TV and Movies suite concentrates on video playback and transcoding, but only uses two threads at a maximum, so performance here is based more on clock speed and IPC (instructions per clock) than anything else. The ASUS boards have only a very slight advantage here. The Gaming benchmark relies on the hard disk and video card for over 50% of its score (see the Editor's Note above), and we're using the same HDD and video card for all platforms, ssssss Unlike the Gaming test, the Music test results have more real-world relevance, since multi-threading is much more common in music transcoding applications than it is in games. The Intel DX79SI edges fractionally ahead of the P9X79 here, but the Sabertooth beats them both at stock speeds. The wins are piling up in the Intel column. Let's move on to CINEBENCH. CINEBENCH R11.5 BenchmarksMaxon CINEBENCH is a real-world test suite that assesses the computer's performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on Maxon's award-winning animation software, Cinema 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. Maxon software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many more. CINEBENCH Release 11.5 includes the ability to more accurately test the industry's latest hardware, including systems with up to 64 processor threads, and the testing environment better reflects the expectations of today's production demands. A more streamlined interface makes testing systems and reading results incredibly straightforward. The CINEBENCH R11.5 test scenario comprises three tests: an OpenGL-based test that models a simple car chase, and single-core and multi-core versions of a CPU-bound computation using all of a system's processing power to render a photo-realistic 3D scene, "No Keyframes", the viral animation by AixSponza. This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores, and all rendering is performed by the CPU: the graphics card is not involved except as a display device. The multi-core version of the rendering benchmark uses as many cores as the processor has, including the "virtual cores" in processors that support Hyper-Threading. The resulting "CineMark" is a dimensionless number only useful for comparisons with results generated from the same version of CINEBENCH.
The Intel motherboard trails in the multi-core rendering test but edges 1/100th of a point ahead of the ASUS boards in the single-core rendering test, although this is within the margin of error of the benchmark. CPU-Dependent 3D GamingStreet Fighter IV uses a new, built-from-scratch graphics engine that enables CAPCOM to tune the visuals and performance to fit the needs of the game, as well as run well on lower-end hardware. Although the engine is based on DX9 capabilities, it does add soft shadows, High Dynamic Range lighting, depth of field effects, and motion blur to enhance the game experience. The game is multi-threaded, with rendering, audio, and file I/O all running in different threads. The development team has also worked to maintain a relatively constant CPU load in all parts of the game so that on-screen performance does not change dramatically in different game scenarios.
I ran the Street Fighter IV benchmark at its lowest resolution (640x480) will all graphical features turned down to the minimum possible settings. This makes the video card much less of a factor in the results, biasing towards processor performance. The ASUS motherboards place about 7% ahead of the DX79SI at stock speeds. PassMark PerformanceTest 7.0The PassMark PerformanceTest allows you to objectively benchmark a PC using a variety of different speed tests and compare the results to other computers. PassMark comprises a complete suite of tests for your computer, including CPU tests, 2D and 3D graphics tests, disk tests, memory tests, and even tests to determine the speed of your system's optical drive. PassMark tests support Hyper-Threading and systems with multiple CPUs, and allow you to save benchmark results to disk (or to export them to HTML, text, GIF, and BMP formats). Knowledgeable users can use the Advanced Testing section to alter the parameters for the disk, network, graphics, multitasking, and memory tests, and created individual, customized testing suites. But for this review I used only the built-in CPU tests, which aren't configurable. The CPU tests comprise a number of different metrics. The first three I'll look at are integer performance, floating point performance, and a benchmark that finds prime numbers.
The CPU Integer, Float, and Prime tests benefit from overclocking, with the ASUS scores increasing by 18% in all cases.
SSE stands for "Streaming SIMD Extensions", and are instructions that handle multiple chunks of data per instruction (SIMD = Single Instruction Multiple Data). SSE instructions work on single-precision floating point data and are typically used in graphical computations. SSE was Intel's response to AMD's "3D Now", which itself was a response to Intel's MMX instructions. Overclocking nets the ASUS boards 19% extra in the SSE test and 18% in the Encrypt test.
The Compress and String benchmarks show an 18% and 13% improvement, respectively, with overclocking. Handbrake Media EncodingIt's a truism that consumer-level computer performance reached the "fast enough" point years ago, where increases in system performance don't make thing any faster for most people. Web browsing, e-mail, word processing, and even most games won't benefit dramatically from a super-fast CPU. There are some exceptions, though, and media encoding is one of them: transcoding video, especially high-definition video, can bring the strongest system to its knees. Fortunately, media transcoding is one of those things that (depending on the design of the code, of course) that scales really well with both clock speed and the number of cores, so the more you have of both, the better your results will be. The free and open-source Handbrake 0.95 video transcoder is an example of a program that makes full use of the computational resources available. For this test I used Handbrake 0.95 to transcode a standard-definition episode of Family Guy to the "iPhone & iPod Touch" presets, and recorded the total time (in seconds) it took to transcode the video.
The ASUS boards beat the Intel DX79SI by about 8% at stock clock speeds, and overclocking improves the P9X79's score by 14% and the Sabertooth's score by 9%. x264 HD Benchmark 3.19Tech ARP's x264 HD Benchmark comprises the Avisynth video scripting engine, an x264 encoder, a sample 720P video file, and a script file that actually runs the benchmark. The script invokes four two-pass encoding runs and reports the average frames per second encoded as a result. The script file is a simple batch file, so you could edit the encoding parameters if you were interested, although your results wouldn't then be comparable to others.
Here's another test where overclocking really helps. The frames per second score of the ASUS motherboards increases by 15% and 20% in Run 1, and by 14% and 20% in Run 2. 
Overclocking brings improvements of 18% and 10% for the P9X79 and Sabertooth boards in Runs 3 and 4. SPECviewperf 11 testsThe Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation is "...a non-profit corporation formed to establish, maintain and endorse a standardized set of relevant benchmarks that can be applied to the newest generation of high-performance computers." Their free SPECviewperf benchmark incorporates code and tests contributed by several other companies and is designed to stress computers in a reproducible way. SPECviewperf 11 was released in June 2010 and incorporates an expanded range of capabilities and tests. Note that results from previous versions of SPECviewperf cannot be compared with results from the latest version, as even benchmarks with the same name have been updated with new code and models. SPECviewperf comprises test code from several vendors of professional graphics modeling, rendering, and visualization software. Most of the tests emphasize the CPU over the graphics card, and have between 5 and 13 sub-sections. For this review I ran the Lightwave, Maya, and Seimens Teamcenter Visualization tests. Results are reported as abstract scores, with higher being better. LightwaveThe lightwave-01 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workloads generated by the SPECapc for Lightwave 9.6 benchmark. The models for this viewset range in size from 2.5 to 6 million vertices, with heavy use of vertex buffer objects (VBOs) mixed with immediate mode. GLSL shaders are used throughout the tests. Applications represented by the viewset include 3D character animation, architectural review, and industrial design. MayaThe maya-03 viewset was created from traces of the graphics workload generated by the SPECapc for Maya 2009 benchmark. The models used in the tests range in size from 6 to 66 million vertices, and are tested with and without vertex and fragment shaders. State changes such as those executed by the application- including matrix, material, light and line-stipple changes- are included throughout the rendering of the models. All state changes are derived from a trace of the running application. Siemens Teamcenter Visualization MockupThe tcvis-02 viewset is based on traces of the Siemens Teamcenter Visualization Mockup application (also known as VisMockup) used for visual simulation. Models range from 10 to 22 million vertices and incorporate vertex arrays and fixed-function lighting. State changes such as those executed by the application- including matrix, material, light and line-stipple changes- are included throughout the rendering of the model. All state changes are derived from a trace of the running application.
The SPECviewperf suite is a good example of a real-world test of applications that would normally be the province of a high-end workstation: the individual tests comprise code and models from real applications, running scripts that do real work. The Intel board trails as usual, but its 30% deficit in Maya is surprising. SPECapc LightwaveSPECapc (Application Performance Characterization) tests are fundamentally different from the SPECviewperf tests. While SPECviewperf tests incorporate code from the various test programs directly into the benchmark, the SPECapc tests are separate scripts and datasets that are run against a stand-alone installation of the program being benchmarked. SPECapc group members sponsor applications and work with end-users, user groups, publications and ISVs to select and refine workloads, which consist of data sets and benchmark script files. Workloads are determined by end-users and ISVs, not SPECapc group members. These workloads will evolve over time in conjunction with end-users' needs and the increasing functionality of PCs and workstations. For this test, I ran the SPECapc "Lightwave" benchmark against a trial installation of Newtek's Lightwave 3D product. The benchmark, developed in cooperation with NewTek, provides realistic workloads that simulate a typical LightWave 3D workflow. It contains 11 datasets ranging from 64,000 to 1.75 million polygons and representing such applications as 3D character animation, architectural review, and industrial design. Scores for individual workloads are composited under three categories: interactive, render and multitask. The benchmark puts special emphasis on processes that benefit from multi-threaded computing, such as animation, OpenGL playback, deformations, and high-end rendering that includes ray tracing, radiosity, complex textures and volumetric lighting. The test reports three scores: Animation (multitasking), Animation (interactive), and Rendering. The numeric scores represent the time it took to complete each section of the benchmark, in seconds, so lower scores are better. I've found the SPECapc Lightwave 3D test to be an excellent indicator of overclock stability. In many cases, overclocked systems that will make it through every other benchmark here will crash in this test. 
Bear in mind that what this benchmark does is use scripts to control a stand-alone instance of Lightwave, so in that sense it's more indicative of real-world performance than the embedded Lightwave code in SPECviewperf. Overclocking here gives the ASUS boards another 9-10%. Blender Benchmark ResultsBlender is an open-source, free content creation suite of 3D modeling, rendering, and animation capabilities. Originally released in 2002, it's available in versions for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and several Unix distributions. It supports rigid and soft-body objects and can handle the draping and animation of cloth, as well as the rendering and animation of smoke, water, and general particle handling. Our Blender test renders multiple frames of an animation of a rotating chunk of ice, with translucency and reflections. Rendering of this model uses ray-tracing algorithms and the program reports the rendering time for each of the animation's 25 frames. The results are a summation of the rendering times for all frames and the lower the score, the better. 
Blender is limited to a maximum of 8 threads, and so cannot make full use of the 12 threads that the Core i7-3960X can dispatch. Overclocking boosts the P9X79's score by 16% and the Sabertooth's score by 23%. POV-Ray Benchmark ResultsThe Persistence of Vision ray tracer is a free, open source 3D modeling program that uses ray-tracing algorithms to generate realistic three dimensional images. Ray tracing is very computationally intensive, and the POV-Ray program has a handy built-in benchmark to let you check the performance of your system.
Both ASUS boards beat the Intel DX79SI by 7%. The odd result here is that while the P9X79 Deluxe's overclock improves its score by 12%, the Sabertooth's higher overclock doesn't improve its score at all. X79 Motherboard Final ThoughtsWhile Intel's new Sandy Bridge Extreme platform raises the performance bar to a whole new level, it does so at a high cost: the least expensive Sandy Bridge Extreme processor, the Core i7-3930X, is over $500 at retail, and X79 Express-based motherboards are quite expensive as well (although, to be fair, their prices are similar to X58 Express motherboard prices when that platform was introduced). A quick check on Newegg shows X79 motherboard prices ranging from $224.99 to $469.99.
The Intel DX79SI is not available at retail as of the time of this article, but Intel says it will sell in the "$280-$300 range". The ASUS P9X79 Deluxe is $379.99 at Newegg, and the ASUS Sabertooth X79 TUF is $339.99. Both are significantly more expensive than the Intel board, but offer extra features and ASUS' reputation for quality and support to compensate. The Intel board came into this comparison with the disadvantage of a beta BIOS that made overclocking impossible and even at stock clock speeds resulted in a last-place finish in all but two of the tests. Still, the Intel's performance deficit was small enough that you'd only see it on benchmarks and never in "real life" applications. And I'm sure that when the board's available and has a production BIOS that its stock-clock performance will improve. After all, who knows the CPU and chipset better than Intel? Sandy Bridge Extreme ConclusionThe Intel DX79SI motherboard isn't competitive with the ASUS boards; large skull insignia aside, it's simply outclassed on performance and features. That said, it's $40-$80 less than the ASUS motherboards, and that's money you can put into other parts of your system. And while I wasn't able to overclock it, I have high hopes for its "DX79SI Overclocking Assistant" feature, which looks as though it might offer superior auto-overclocking performance, although I suspect ASUS' advanced power circuitry may allow their motherboard to have higher ultimate overclocking limits. ASUS' motherboards continue to impress me, which is why I prefer them for my personal systems. I am especially fond of the TUF series: I have thee TUF motherboards, and have never had a problem with any of them, even the much-abused X58 TUF I use in my heat sink test machine. If you're interested in more information about these motherboards, check out our detailed reviews of the Intel DX79SI, the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe, and the ASUS Sabertooth X79 TUF. Benchmark Reviews invites you to leave constructive feedback below, or ask questions in our Discussion Forum.
Related Articles:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Comments
HAPPY HOLIDAYS DUDES DUDETTES AND ALL OTHER LIFE FORMS ON THIS PLANET...PEACE OUT BYE BYE