If the recent release of Intel’s X58 chipset has taught us anything, it’s that change can be good. In our first two forays with these new boards and Intel’s Core i7 processor, we’ve been firmly impressed by the performance gains seen over legacy Core 2 architectures, much less AMD’s recent advancements and new offerings. Now, with some time under our belts, we’re going to take a look at two new Intel X58 Express chipset based boards from ASUS and MSI that we’ve put through the test ringer. Focusing on the upper-tier of the PC market, both come fully stocked with additional components, fancy board designs, and all of the other benefits that the X58 provides, with higher-end prices to match.
First, we’ll start off with an overview of the Intel X58 Express chipset. As shown in the block diagram below, the major changes revolve around the CPU’s system and memory interfaces. Considering Intel’s relatively slower evolution over their past few chipset updates, it’s almost as if they sat back, looked at what needed changing, and then just went ahead and did them all in one fell swoop.
- Introduction
- ASUS Rampage II Extreme - Specifications
- ASUS Rampage II Extreme - Layout and Features
- ASUS Rampage II Extreme - BIOS & Overclocking
- MSI Eclipse - Specifications
- MSI Eclipse - Layout and Features
- MSI Eclipse - BIOS & Overclocking
- Test Setup and SANDRA Results
- PCMark Vantage and 3DMark06
- Cinebench and POV-Ray Rendering
- Low-Res Gaming Framerates
- High-Res Gaming and SLI Testing
- LameMT MP3 Encoding and Power Consumption
- Performance Summary and Conclusion
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