The X79 Board to
Silence Them All?
X
79 Motherboards
are aplenty and
we’re bound to see
countless revisions
for at least the next
12 months. Much like with X58,
each generation of boards
coincided with better CPUs and
higher overclocks.
With X58 it’s hard to say what
the ultimate board was as the
later 990 X and 980X CPUs were
such wonderful overclocking
CPUs that they negated the
differences in most offerings.
Especially at such stratospheric
speeds, it was merely a test
of which board was quicker to
overclock rather than which one
wouldn’t make the speed at all.
At least that was the case with
the better CPUs.
Our own attempt to find the
ultimate X58 board didn’t end
so well with several dead 990X
CPUs hence you never did see
that feature. So in order to avoid
such a catastrophe, we decided
to do this round up earlier
rather than later. We managed
to gather four motherboards,
two in the high end and two
which we would consider
the value options. The INTEL
DX79SI would be used to keep
these boards honest, because
the last thing any vendor would
want is a motherboard that is no
better than the INTEL board but
commands a greater price tag.
Our testing methodology was
simple; Try and figure out which
is the most efficient board,
the easiest to overclock, the
most feature packed board in
terms of overclocking options
and ultimately the best value
motherboard in its chosen
segment. This was easier said
than done because the X79
32 The OverClocker Issue 18 | 2012
platform is inherently targeted
at the high end so the boards
will always be less about value
and more about features
and functionality. With each
board offering 4-way graphics
courtesy of the numerous
PCI-E lanes made available
by the CPUs we had thought
of testing 4-way graphics on
each board, but getting a hold
of four 7970 graphics cards at
the time proved to be anything
but simple and while we initially
did test with two 6970 Graphics
cards in crossfire. We decided
to re-do the entire feature using
the beastly HD7970.
During our testing, we also
had to switch out CPU’s so
what you are seeing here is
actually our third attempt
at this, because when we
had almost collected all the
results, our chosen 3960X
CPU started to degrade in
what can only be termed a
“phenomenal” rate. From the
chosen 4625 MHz we were
using (37x125) to not being able
to pass a single CineBench run
at anything above 4000MHz,
we had somehow managed to
depreciate our CPU. As such
we had to resort to the 3930K,
however the results were
near identical and moreover
this CPU actually had a great
IMC that was capable of close
to 2600MHz with all four
sticks installed.
What follows on the next page
is a breakdown of our thoughts
on each board and ultimately
the results when put through
our standard benchmarks. We
would investigate how much
difference there actually is in
the various implementations of
the X79 chipset is any at all.