ASRock X58 Extreme 3 Motherboard - Synthetic System, CPU and Memory

Synthetic Performance:

To start things off we'll take a look at PCMark Vantage numbers.  This entire system is very similar to the one we built for the Core i7 920 review as previously mentioned.  However, the hard drives were swapped out with the SSD and this completely changed all of the results from PCMark.  We say 400% performance improvement on the disk tests and almost 100% increase in the overall scores.  With that in mind, we dropped the comparison numbers on this test and merely ran stock vs. overclocked comparisons in the chart below.  PCMark is an interesting beast as one component can dramatically change the overall performance metric.

Overclocking yields a modest increase in performance but with a mere 15% overclock we're not expecting anything mind-bending in terms of performance gains here.

Benchmarking - Everest:

Because there is a lot of system tweaking that goes along with clocking up memory to non-standard speeds, we haven't included any "real-world" benchmarks.  In order to get the memory to run at speeds other than 1066MHz, 1333MHz, 1600MHz or 1866MHz the motherboard bus and CPU must be clocked up in order to achieve these speeds.  As we've shown before the CPU plays a huge roll in benchmark performance and so it's not fair to compare WinRAR compression when the CPU is clocked up 400MHz faster.  Of course the "RAM" will look faster, but in reality the CPU is the one doing the work.  For this reason we use two simply synthetic benchmarks to show memory performance.  How it affects performance in the real-world will depend largely on CPU, motherboard and other hardware bottlenecks so we have to be content with synthetic benchmarks to gain our number metric.  First up is Everest.

The memory performance of both of these systems is very good, and at stock speeds the ASRock X58 Extreme 3 wins almost every segment of the Everest memory test.  However, the performance lags when overclocking as the Extreme 3 doesn't have as much headroom and this shows in the tweaked numbers.

SiSoft shows memory performance that is basically identical between systems.

Finally we take a look at PMCore - a program that calculates prime numbers.  This program is multi-threaded and we used it to calculate 10,000 prime numbers.  The results below are in seconds.tenths.

At stock speeds, the ASRock X58 Extreme 3 takes the lead in both single and multi-threaded benchmarks of PMCore.  Overclocking performance suffers though as the other systems have almost a 900MHz lead on the Extreme 3 system.

On the next page we'll carry on with some real-world application tests before we go gaming with this motherboard.