Motherboard GPU Performance Check!

Here’s a quick rundown of PCIe performance on several X79 motherboards. We used a single Radeon HD7970 in 3DMark Vantage and just focused on the GPU score. As you can see, performance varies quite substantially even when using a single graphics card.

As you can see, the GIGABYTE and ASUS offerings are virtually indistinguishable with less than 0.01% difference in the scores. For the record, no credence should be given to any benchmark result that shows variance in boards of 1% or less. Between these two, the results varied and the advantage went either way with no meaningful pattern to the scores. So ignoring these two will make the graph more relevant in terms of sussing out which board could do with some tuning. (All scores represent an average of three complete runs)

The ECS motherboard is for all intents and purposes the 2nd fastest board just 1% slower than the top two. The Asrock Extreme9 1.12% slower, followed by the INTEL DX79SI at a 1.66% deficit. The Sapphire Pure Black X79N is surprisingly 5.59% slower. Something is amiss with this board at this time. We suspect the BIOS is at fault here because the CPU performance is on par with the other boards at the least. Making this result even more peculiar is that in the 3DMark11 Physics test, The Pure X79N was faster than the GIGABYTE X79-UD7 by 1.39% and a sizeable 3.96% advantage over the Asrock x79 Extreme9.

We suspect future BIOS updates will iron this out and for a board that’s not available at most retailers right now there’ some time for SAPPHIRE to iron out this oddity. Some more testing is taking place and we will bring you a full break down of the results as more boards come in.

Out!