How we test
Comparison systems |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Motherboard | ASUS P8Z68-V PRO | ASUS P8P67 PRO | Gigabyte P67A-UD3 | ASUS P8P67 Deluxe | ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme | |
| Motherboard BIOS | 8801 | 1401 | F5 | 1053 | 1102 | |
| Processor | Intel Core i5 2500K | AMD Phenom II X6 1055T | ||||
| Chipset driver | Intel Inf 9.2.0.1019 and RST 10.1 (10.5 for Z68) | Catalyst 10.12 chipset driver | ||||
| Memory | Corsair 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 | |||||
| Memory timings | 9-9-9-24-1T @ 1,333MHz | |||||
| Graphics | AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB | |||||
| Graphics driver | Catalyst 10.12 | |||||
| Disk drive | Corsair V128 SSD | |||||
| Optical drive | Sony AD-7263S | |||||
| Chassis | Corsair Obsidian Series 700D | |||||
| Power supply | Corsair HX1000W | |||||
| Operating system | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit | |||||
CPU and memory benchmarks |
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| AIDA64 v1.50.1200 | The successor to Everest - useful for measuring memory bandwidth and latency | |||||
| HEXUS.PiFast |
Our number-crunching benchmark stresses a single core by calculating Pi to 10m places | |||||
| wPrime 2.0.4 | Another number-crunching benchmark that stresses all available CPU cores/threads | |||||
| CINEBENCH 11.5 | Using Cinebench's multi-CPU render, this cross-platform benchmark stresses all cores | |||||
| 7zip 9.20 | We use the built-in benchmark in this open-source file-compression utility | |||||
| TrueCrypt 7.0a | An encryption/decryption benchmark that's partial to AES acceleration | |||||
GPU benchmarks |
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| StarCraft II | DX9, 1,280x720 low quality and 1,680x1,050 medium quality. | |||||
| Call of Duty: Black Ops | DX9, 1,680x1,050, 4xAA, high quality | |||||
| 3DMark Vantage b1.2 | Run at the default performance preset | |||||
General benchmarks |
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| Storage performance | USB 2.0/3.0 read speed, SSD average read speed | |||||
| Power consumption | While idling and when running wPrime | |||||
Testing notes
Keeping parity with the other setups, a Radeon HD 6950 2GB card is the sole display for this round of benchmarking; the IGP's switched off in the BIOS.
