Power-draw and overclocking
Four-way HD 5870 CrossFire and a high-end Intel CPU make for a hungry combination, but load power-draw remains within the constraints of a 1,000W PSU.
The added features of the Gigabyte board ensure it consumes some eight per cent more power than the ASUS offering.
Overclocking
The overclocking crowd is admittedly going to be using more exotic means of cooling, but even with Intel's reference heatsink and fan, the UD9 shows plenty of promise.
With a little bump in core voltage, we were able to run a base clock of 220MHz with a 19x multiplier. Switching to 20x in Turbo mode, the overclock returns a CPU speed of 4.4GHz.
A healthy bump up from a stock 3.33GHz, and we suspect users with a few canisters of liquid nitrogen will scream past the 6GHz mark.
Using our air-cooled, 32 per cent overclock, we scored a HEXUS.PiFast rating of 19.42 seconds. That's just over a 20 per cent performance boost.