CPU Performance Results

We spent a couple of weeks with the ECS X79R-AX before beginning our performance testing, running various configurations and CPUs, and checking hardware compatibility. We verified our power consumption numbers using various different power supplies, and played a few hours of games with some members of the TPU community to get an overall feel for the board and to verify stability. Once completed, we tore down the system, mounted our Noctua cooler and put the board through the paces. We noticed no compatibility issues however we must say that the performance results that follow are not completely indicative of the ECS X79R-AX's performance, as differing CPU technology between platforms will always affect the end results. At the same time, we have removed all AMD results in the performance section in order to level out the playing field. We are also slowly adding new benchmarks to our testing routine, each of which will be added to the results as we gather enough results to provide meaningful statistics.

SuperPi

SuperPI serves as our memory-focused benchmark, being highly single-threaded. The ECS X79R-AX is right on top here, but given the benefits of the larger onboard cache, and quad-channel memory, we would have been very disappointed to see anything else.

wPrime

wPrime is much more CPU-focused, but memory plays its role as well. In this test, the numbers were much of the same as SuperPi, with the four extra processing threads on the i7 3960X really helping out.

WinRAR

Part of our motherboard benchmarking suite is the built-in benchmark that is part of the WinRAR software suite. In this test, the ECS X79R-AX put up good numbers again, once again due to the extra cores available.

AIDA64

We employed AIDA64's memory bench to highlight memory bandwidth. We isolate the write performance metric as it serves as a good indicator of overall memory performance. Here the ECS X79R-AX ended up at the bottom of the pile, but it's worth noting that this particular test fails to take advantage of all four available memory channels.

HandBrake Encoding

Handbrake is used for encoding testing, and provided results much similar to the previous benchmarks, with the ECS X79R-AX sitting a fair distance ahead of our previously best result.

CineBench Encoding

In Cinebench GPU testing, the ECS X79R-AX was again a bit low, but given that the two products that stand ahead here have significant clock speed advantages due to non-standard default clocks, the results are just where we expected, slightly out in front of the average. The Cinebench CPU testing, of course, painted a different picture, with no doubt that the ECS X79R-AX paired with the new Intel i7 3960X is a performance king.