SiSoft Sandra 2011 Benchmarks
In our benchmark tests, we will be comparing MSI X79A-GD45 vs Gigabyte X79-UD7, the SABERTOOTH 990FX and to a similarly configured Intel Core i5 system running on Gigabyte Z68X-UD7-B3 mainboard.
The MSI X79A-GD45 is running Intel Core i7-3960X processor with ASUS Radeon HD 6850 with Catalyst 11.1, 4 x 2GB DDR3-1866 GSkill at C9-10-9-28-2T. Kingston SSDNOW V Series 64GB and runs Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bits.
The Gigabyte X79-UD7 is paired with INTEL Core i7 3960X, ASUS Radeon HD 6850 with Catalyst 11.11, 4 x 2GB DDR3-2133 Corsair memory at C9-11-10-27-98-1T, Kingston SSDNOW V Series 64GB and runs Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bits.
The Gigabyte Z68X-UD7-B3 with Core i5 2500K runs at 100.3×33 (3.309GHz) while the ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX with Phenom II X6 1100T has it’s CPU clocking at 200.7×16.5 (3.3115GHz).
The same 4GB RAM, graphics card (ASUS Radeon HD6850+CAT 11.5) is used on the two boards. The ASUS SABERTOOTH is configured to run at C7-8-7-20-1T DDR3-1600 whereas the Intel Z68 runs at DDR3-1866, C7-8-7-20-1T.
The processor used on the SABERTOOTH 990FX is a Phenom II X6 1100T processor clock at 200.7MHz x 16.5. On the Intel Z68, we have a Core i5-2500K processor running at 100.3 x 33.
We will first test out the memory benchmarks, followed by Arithmetic, Multimedia and Transcoding.
In Memory benchmark, we see a big improvement in memory bandwidth as X79 adopts a quad channel architecture. In fact, with the 4 modules running at DDR3-1866 (MSI), DDR3-2133 (Gigabyte) as compared to the two other boards at dual channel DDR3-1866 (C7) and DDR3-1600 (C7), we aren’t a bit surprised by the result. The memory bandwidth broke the 40GB/s mark reaching 42.18GB/s. The MSI X79A-GD45 paired with G.Skill Quad DDR3-1866 is slightly lower at 42.18 GB/s. We will see if that impact the remaining results.
When overclocked to 4.7GHz, the memory shot up to 44.72GB/s.
Although the Intel (Core i5 2500K, 3960X) and AMD (Phenom II 1100T) are all clocked at 3.3GHz, the performance is quite different. We can clearly see that the Core i7-3960X leads the competition by almost 2 times. In fact, the MSI X79A-GD45 performs slightly better than the Gigabyte X79-UD7 in this test.
When overclocked, it scored 155 GOPS.
In Multimedia test, the score is 225.15 Mpixel/s, just slightly above the Gigabyte X79 board. Of course, the multimedia processing performance far surpasses the Core i5 2500K and Phenom II 1100T.
When overclocked to 4.7GHz, the test scores 255.23Mpixel/s.
Likewise in Transcoding test, the MSI X79A-GD45 seems to have a slight advantage, perhaps it is because of it’s newest revision of BIOS?
Overclocking it to 4.7GHz gave the result a boost to 1.25MB/s
Great to the point review,I for one am moving away from the more costly boards and totally happy and your review shows how simplicity can be a great payoff.