CPU Performance Results

I spent a bit over two weeks with the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion before beginning our performance testing, running various configurations and CPUs, and checking hardware compatibility. I verified my power consumption numbers using various different power supplies, and played a few hours of games with some members of the TPU community to get an overall feel for the board and to verify stability. Once completed, I tore down the system, mounted my Noctua cooler and put the board through the paces.

SuperPi

SuperPi serves as our memory-focused benchmark, being highly single-threaded. The ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion ended up missing the mark here, finishing dead last.

wPrime

wPrime is much more CPU-focused, but memory plays its role as well. In this test, the numbers were much better here with the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion high up the chart, but still slower than other tested Intel X79 Express products.

WinRAR

Part of our motherboard benchmarking suite is the built-in benchmark that is part of the WinRAR software suite. In this test, the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion was just behind the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5.

AIDA64

We employed AIDA64's memory bench to highlight memory bandwidth. We isolate the write performance metric as it serves as a good indicator of overall memory performance. Here the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion scored high, sitting just 7 MB/s slower than the ASUS P8Z77-V, using a 3770K CPU. Awesome results here for X79!

HandBrake Encoding

Handbrake is used for encoding testing, and provided results much similar to the previous benchmarks, with the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion sitting a bit behind the other X79 results yet again.

CineBench Encoding

In Cinebench, the ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion utterly disappoints. I was left confused...fantastic memory bandwidth but horrible CPU performance!

Seeing such out-of-line results made me investigate further. I spent a long time re-testing trying to figure out what was going on, only to find that my intuition earlier was keener than I had thought. It seems that the ASRock Fatal1ty X78 Champion runs a rather relaxed Turbo profile, leading to a maximum of 3600 MHz rather than the "up to 3900 MHz" the CPU is supposed to run at. I do have to point out that I am using an "ES" i7 3960X CPU sample, and this may have played a role here, and I will be working with ASRock to make sure that this situation is remedied for retail CPUs, if it isn't already.