The I7 930 CPU that we chose for this review runs at a stock speed of 2.8 Ghz or a little over 2.9 Ghz with Turbo Mode enabled. We ran a quick 10 pass LinX run at stock, 3.8 Ghz, and finally at 4.0 Ghz. The only 120mm fans we had laying around were of the Thermaltake variety intended as case fans. These fans were pretty low RPM (1800) so the cooling capability of the Megahalems we installs was a bit limited, so we stopped at 4.0 Ghz due to heat issues. If you have read any of our previous motherboard reviews, we like to get a solid 1 Ghz overclock if possible, we actually got a 1.2 Ghz overclock here. With a water cooling setup, we are more than confident this EVGA X58-SLI3 motherboard/CPU combination can easily do a heck of a lot more.

Lets have a run of SuperPI 1M at these different clocks and compare the speeds.

Next we ran the ever popular wPrime 32M at the three different CPU speeds. Here are those results.

Next we’ll dive in to the full suite of Everest 5.5 benchmarks at all three different CPU clocks. Keep in mind as you read these results that some of the tests translate to a lower score being better. Everest has many built in test results that can be used for comparisons. You will notice that our test system comes in at or near the top in almost every test we ran.

First up are the memory tests, memory read, write, copy and latency.

Memory Read Stock	Memory Read 3.8 Ghz	Memory Read 4.0 Ghz

Memory Write stock	Memory Write 3.8 Ghz	Memory Write 4.0 Ghz

Memory Copy Stock	Memory Copy 3.8 Ghz	Memory Copy 4.0 Ghz

Memory Latency Stock	Memory Latency 3.8 Ghz	Memory Latency 4.0 Ghz

Next up is the CPU Queen, CPU PhotoWorxx, CPU Zlib and CPU AES testing.

CPU Queen Stock	CPU Queen 3.8 Ghz	CPU Queen 4.0 Ghz

CPU PhotoWorxx Stock	CPU PhotoWorxx 3.8 Ghz	CPU PhotoWorxx 4.0 Ghz

CPU Zlib Stock	CPU Zlib 3.8 Ghz	CPU Zlib 4.0 Ghz

CPU AES Stock	CPU AES 3.8 Ghz	CPU AES 4.0 Ghz

Rounding out the Everest 5.5 testing is the FPU testing.

FPU Julia Stock	FPU Julia 3.8 Ghz	FPU Julia 4.0 Ghz

FPU Mandel Stock	FPU Mandel 3.8 Ghz	FPU Mandel 4.0 Ghz

FPU SinJulia Stock	FPU SinJulia 3.8 Ghz	FPU SinJulia 4.0 Ghz

Pretty darn good showing in the Everest suite of tests. It’s getting pretty easy to be impressed with this motherboard at this point. Moving on with our testing phase of the review, we decided to run Cinebench 10 and Cinebench 11.5 for some real world performance numbers. If you remember from the system specs above, we have a couple EVGA GTX 260 Graphics cards for some SLI action. In order to allow better cooling we mounted the 2nd card in the bottom PCI-e X8 slot which left a nice space between the two cards. A quick test of GPU-z showed the top card running at X16 and the bottom card running at X8, just as the specifications promised. Another thing to mention here is that the 2-way SLI bridge provided was the flexible type and it spanned the distance easily. Below are the test results from the Cinebench runs at the same stock and overclock speeds the Everest tests were performed at.

Cinebench R10 Benchmark
Stock	3.8 Ghz	4.0 Ghz

Cinebench 11.5  CPU Benchmark
Stock	3.8 Ghz	4.0 Ghz

Cinebench 11.5 OpenGL Benchmark
Stock	3.8 Ghz	4.0 Ghz

Another good set of numbers turned in by the EVGA X58-SLI3 and I7 930 CPU combination.