ECS X58B-A Black Edition Motherboard Review

Throughput Tests

SiSoft’s Sandra has become a mainstay in checking system performance while WinRar is a commonly used archiving tool. With Sandra 2009 I will be testing the memory bandwidth while with WinRar I’ll test the system’s theoretical compression speed to provide another real-world test.

The Sandra bandwidth test shows why the X58 system performed so well in the tests. Even though theoretically there was only a 50% improvement in going from a 128-bit to a 192-bit memory controller, the lower latency from the integrated memory controller dramaticaly increased the amount of available bandwidth. This resulted in a 186% improvement in bandwidth which is what made the huge difference in performance. Winrar shows a nice jump with SMP and even the single-core results show a nice jump to the Core 2 system.