Asus CrossHair II Formula and Hybrid SLI

Testing Methods:

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra, HD Tach and Lavalys Everest, all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 torture test on all cores and expanding to a looping 3DMark06. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

Test Setup:

The Gigabyte GA-78G-DS3H is limited to 95W CPUs so the closest match we had for this was a Phenom X3 8750 at 2.4GHz core clock and 1.8GHz northbridge clock. This is obviously slightly slower than the Phenom X4 9850 BE which is clocked at 2.4GHz with a 2.0GHz northbridge clock.

At the time of testing the GeForce 9800 GTX matched the Radeon HD 4870 in price, and thus the two were selected to be tested against one another. Rather than aim for the most tweaked memory subsystem we can, all systems used identical memory speeds because the memory performance is more indicative of CPU quality and CPU performance than motherboard.