ECS X79R-AX (Intel X79) Motherboard Review

 

We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, ASUS, MSI, Western Digital and Corsair.

 

In typical fashion we'll ignore going into any real detail on our testbed as most of the information is above. As for the boards we'll be comparing today, we'll see all that in the coming pages as we look at our graphs. Instead we'll just get into the overclocking side of things to see just what kind of performance we can get out of our i7 3960X today in the new ECS X79R-AX.

 

That performance over stock today would actually be nothing! Well, that's not completely true to be honest - before this happened...

 

 

We were up and running in HyperPi bouncing around 4.6GHz - 4.7GHz which was a nice overclock….and then the above happened. Not only did it take the ECS X79R-AX with it...it took our i7 3960X. Let's give a moments silence for our beloved 3960X.

 

*insert moments silence*

 

Because of the fact there's now no overclocking testing, we'll just get into the benchmarks. While we'd normally break down all our benchmarks individually, we won't today because of the lack of overclocking. Instead we'll talk about the USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and SSD performance along with power and heat numbers before we summarize everything in the final thoughts.

 Let's get started