CPU Performance Results

We spent a week with the Gigabyte X79S-UP5 WiFi 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.

SuperPi

SuperPI serves as our memory-focused benchmark, being highly single-threaded. The Gigabyte X79S-UP5 WiFi ended up a bit slower here, but that was expected.

wPrime

wPrime is much more CPU-focused, and here the extra cores of the 3960X CPU pay off, letting the Gigabyte X79S-UP5 WiFi greatly outclass the other two boards.

WinRAR

WinRAR also takes advantage of the extra cores, and ends up seeing near 100% efficiency gains from those cores when compared to the other two results.

AIDA64

I use AIDA64's memory benchmark to highlight memory bandwidth. X79 Express itself fails with this workload, as AIDA64 fails to fully utilize all four channels of the SB-E's quad-channel controller.

HandBrake Encoding

Handbrake is used for encoding testing, and provided results much similar to the previous benchmarks, with the Gigabyte X79S-UP5 WiFi taking the top spot overall.

CineBench Encoding

In Cinebench, the Gigabyte X79S-UP5 WiFi was a bit slower in the GPU portion than I had expected, considering the other results. The CPU results, on the other hand, have the Gigabyte X79S-UP5 WiFi on top again.