EVGA X79 FTW Motherboard Review

Posted by Gilgamesh on March 5th, 2012

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Because running the X79 FTW at 4.5Ghz is such an easy speed to obtain, even for those using air cooling, we decided to run our bench marks using that speed. Just about anyone should be able to settle on a 4.5Ghz overclock (or more) for daily use, so we thought it was a great reference point for our benchmark testing.

Starting the testing phase of this review we’ll evaluate the SATA 6 Intel controller using ATTO and Crystal Disk Mark. We used a Western Digital Black SATA 6 1TB 64Mb Cache Hard drive for testing.

The above results are about what we would expect for this controller/hard drive combination. The read and write results with ATTO show a balanced result indicating good smooth data flow going in and coming out.

Next, we wanted to test the ASMedia XHCI USB 3.0 controller and see how it compared to the standard USB 2.0 controller provided natively by the Intel chipset.

First the USB 3.0 results, again using ATTO and Crystal Disk Mark.

Then the Intel USB 2.0 controller.

While there is a performance increase in write speed between the two controllers, the difference is minimal. The big difference between the two controllers can be seen in the read speed, more than double in fact. All of the USB testing went off without a hitch, both controllers worked admirably.

Next up we ran SuperPI 1M and 32M then followed that up with a 32M and 1024M run of wPrime. The results are below.

It goes without saying that a wPrime 32M run that completes in under five seconds is nothing to sneeze at – great showing there. A sub ten second SuperPI 1M run is a great score as well – this run coming in at under 8-1/2 seconds!

Next up is the full battery of tests offered by AIDA64 Extreme. We updated to the latest version of AIDA64 Extreme because it has very current systems preloaded for comparison against ours. For an explanation of what all these test are actually measuring, please visit THIS website for all the information you need. We’ll run all the Memory, CPU, and FPU (Floating Point Unit) benchmarks. First is the memory benchmarks below. It is important to remember that the memory speed and timings have a lot to do with the results of the memory tests. As stated earlier, the memory we used was a set of Quad channel DDR3 1866 G.SKill RipjawsZ 4X4Gb. For some reason AIDA incorrectly shows 35 as our tRAS, but in actuality it is set at 28.

Next we ran the CPU benchmarks, and this combination overclocked to 4.5Ghz pretty much stole the show, out performing everything preloaded into AIDA64 Extreme.