Hunting for a motherboard for my next Core i7 rig, I stumbled upon a very informative article, tomshardware's thorough roundup of seven Core i7 motherboards in the $200-$300 price bracket.
According to them, there were originally ten candidates for the roundup but interestingly two failed to submit samples and one conked out before reaching POST (Power-On Self-Test).
They also warned that spending $200 or more on a new motherboard or simply paying an additional $100 just to obtain the new socket might surprise you with the realities of the Core i7, and checking out this roundup will definitely help you a lot in spotting gems from rubbles in the X58 market.
These are the following boards that were tested:
1. Asus P6T
2. Biostar TPower X58
3. DFI LANParty DK X58-T3eH6
4. EVGA X58 3X SLI
5. Foxconn Renaissance
6. MSI X58 Platinum SLI
7. ASRock X58 SuperComputer
The verdict? The Asus P6T gained top spot, which also happens to be my all time board favorite. Second place goes to MSI X58 Platinum running a base clock of 133.7 Mhz. They also concluded, and I quote:
"With a performance advantage of over 2% over the Foxconn, DFI, ASRock, Biostar, and EVGA products, Asus could have easily won the performance comparison even without its 0.20% base clock advantage. Exceptional performance at its stock settings earns Asus' P6T a spot in each Tom's Hardware lab as our reference platform for 2009."
Percent total performance difference from all benchies are shown below.
You can read more about the Core i7 X58 roundup at tomshardware here.
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