Testing Methods:
With the exception of SiSoft Sandra, all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.
We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 torture test on all cores and expanding to a looping 3DMark06. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.
We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.
Test Setup:
Processor | Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 |
Memory | 2x 1GB Kingston HyperX PC2-9600 @ 800MHz, 3-3-3-9-1T 2x 1GB Corsair PC3-1800 @ 1333MHz, 7-7-7-20-1T |
Graphics | Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX / ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire |
Hard Drive | Seagate 7200.9 200GB SATA 3Gbps |
PSU | PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W |
OS | Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit |
Drivers | Forceware 163.69 |
Drivers | Catalyst 7.10 WHQL |
Systems:
- Abit IX38 QuadGT - BIOS 11
- Gigabyte GA-X38T-DQ6
- Asus Maximus Formula
- Abit IP35 Pro
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