How we test
Gallery
Comparison systems |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Motherboard | Gigabyte P67A-UD3 | Intel DB67HL | ASUS P8P67 Deluxe | ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme | |
| Motherboard BIOS | F5 | 10H | 0804 | 1102 | |
| Processor | Intel Core i5 2500K | AMD Phenom II X6 1055T | |||
| Chipset driver | Intel Inf 9.2.0.1019 and RST 10.1 | Catalyst 10.12 chipset driver | |||
| Memory | Corsair 4GB (2 x 2GB) 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
We've paired the Gigabyte board up with the Intel Core i5 2500K chip. Providing comparison performance numbers is another P67 board from ASUS - P8P67 Deluxe - and an H67 board from Intel. All three run with a Radeon HD 6950 2GB card in the primary slot. Being as all-inclusive as possible, we've selected the best AMD chip and motherboard combination for a similar outlay to the Gigabyte board and Sandy Bridge CPU.