Test Setup
For this article, we used the Core 2 Quad QX9770 and Core i7 920 data from our Core i7 review which used the equipment listed below. We used the same benchmarks, and the same hardware (video card, SSD etc) with the only difference being the i7 motherboard and using a Noctua 12P with the new Socket 1366 mounting kit on the MSI Eclipse.
Hardware used for testing the motherboard:
Benchmarks Used
For now, here is a listing of the tests performed:
- PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004
- PC Magazine Multimedia Content Creation 2004
- RightMark Memory Analyzer
- SiSoft Sandra 2009 CPU, MMX, Memory Benchmarks
- HDTach
- HDTune
- WinRAR
- TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding
- LAME MP3 Encoding
- Call of Duty
- Doom 3
- Quake 4
- Comanche 4
- Halo
- Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
- Unreal Tournament 2004
For the additional gaming tests we used
- World In Conflict
- Devil May Care 4
- Crysis
- Dynasty
Video drivers used were the latest Catalyst drivers 8.10.