Normally when a new chipset hits the market we like to try and get a motherboard from one of the major companies for use in our reviews and initial testing. This goes for any new CPU regardless of if it is AMD or Intel. The reasons are pretty simple; the first is that realistically not that many people but Intel reference products. You get some that will, but the majority are going to buy from Asus, Gigabyte, MSI or one of the other players. This is not saying that Intel boards are not good products; it is just that most consumers have their favorite brands. However we wanted to try things a little differently with the launch of the X79 chipset. We have decided to take a first look at Intel’s reference motherboard and see how well it performs. As with everything we do there are multiple reasons for this. One is we want to see how Intel’s implementation of three-way SLI using the CPU for all PCIe lanes works and we also wanted to see what the overclocking envelope turns out to be. This will give us a great baseline for the reviews of other X79 motherboards in the weeks ahead. So with all that out of the way lets dive into Intel’s X79SI Siler (insert Heroes Reference here).
The Test System and Comments -Our test system is built on an open bench. This has two effects on testing. First it allows us to see everything and also to setup and disassemble the test rigs quickly. Second it means that we cannot gauge the potential air flow found in a normal case. The air is pretty stagnant; some may say this is a great neutral testing method and it can be. However, it does mean that the temperature reading taken off of the components are not accurate to what an average consumer would see. This means that your thermal performance will vary from what we see here. Ok, now for the little things that pop up during an installation and a weeks’ worth of testing. One of the first things that we ran into was with the Renesas USB 3.0 controller. After the installation of the drivers if we had ANY USB device connected to this controller the system would not boot. It would hang on Error code 58 and would not allow a reset but had to be manually powered down. The second thing related to the USB 3.0 controller showed up during our overclocking tests. We found that anything over 4.3GHz caused the USB 3.0 controller to stop picking up drives that were attached. It simply would not see them. We tried to reinstall the driver, but this caused the system to lockup and then we had a rough time getting it to boot back into Windows. In the end we had to boot into safe mode and remove them from there. Now all of these issues could be due to the BETA BIOS that we used with the board. Usually we do not like to test with a non-public or shipping BIOS, however since the board is not publicly available we were ok with running this for our initial testing. We are confident that Intel will fix this issue in the time before this hit the market.Performance testing overview -Our testing is a little different than most. We combine both synthetic and real-world applications to simulate the types of performance common to the individual products. For motherboards this means that we run roughly six synthetic tests and two real-world. We will be expanding the real-world testing in the near future. But there is more to performance than just the raw numbers. As there are multiple components and sub-components on a motherboard there each item can have a distinct impact on the way the product will perform once you get it in your system. It is important to note not only the actual results but what they mean to you as a potential consumer. We will try to give this information to you. But we do not just cover the performance aspects that are measurable. We also talk about the components that might not have a direct benchmark. These are items like Audio Quality, ease of use and installation.
