EVEREST CPU Benchmarks

Lavalys EVEREST Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems. Furthermore, complete software, operating system and security information makes EVEREST Ultimate Edition a comprehensive system diagnostics tool that offers a total of 100 pages of information about your PC.

All of the benchmarks used in our test bed: Queen, Photoworxx, ZLib, and AES, all rely on basic x86 instructions, and consume very low system memory while also being aware of HyperThreading, multi-processors, and multi-core processors. While the EVEREST CPU tests really only compare the processor performance more than it measures platforms, it still offers a glimpse into what kind of power each platform possesses.

Queen and Photoworxx tests are synthetic benchmarks that operate the function many times over and over-exaggerate by several magnitudes what the real-world performance would be like. The Queen benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and misprediction penalties of the CPU. It does this by finding possible solutions to the classic queen problem on a chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores.

Since the exact same Intel Core i7-920 processor was used for all tests it's not surprising to see similar results reported in each benchmark; which is why we're focusing on finding the trend. Since we consider the Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard to be our reference in these tests, the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 out-performs the original design by 1.25%. ASUS further extends performance with the P6X58D-Premium motherboard in CPU-Queen calculations.

Like the Queen benchmark, the Photoworxx tests for penalties against pipeline architecture. The synthetic Photoworxx benchmark stresses the integer arithmetic and multiplication execution units of the CPU and also the memory subsystem. Due to the fact that this test performs high memory read/write traffic, it cannot effectively scale in situations where more than two processing threads are used. The EVEREST Photoworxx benchmark performs the following tasks on a very large RGB image:

• Fill
• Flip
• Rotate90R (rotate 90 degrees CW)
• Rotate90L (rotate 90 degrees CCW)
• Random (fill the image with random colored pixels)
• RGB2BW (color to black & white conversion)
• Difference
• Crop

Using the Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard as a point of reference, the Core i7-920 performed 1.28% better at PhotoWorxx tasks on X58A-USD7, while the ASUS P6X58D-Premium motherboard delivered an additional increase.

The Zip Library test measures combined CPU and memory subsystem performance through the public ZLib compression library. ZLib is designed as a free lossless data compression library for use on virtually any computer hardware and operating system. The ZLib data format is itself portable across platforms and has a footprint independent of input data that can be reduced at some cost in compression.

Zip-library performance produced 90,050 KBps with the EX-58-UD4 motherboard, while the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 delivered a 0.9% increase to 90,820 KBps. The ASUS P6X58D-Premium motherboard rendered 94,294 KBps in Zip-library benchmarks.

The AES integer benchmark measures CPU performance using AES data encryption. It utilizes Vincent Rijmen, Antoon Bosselaers and Paulo Barreto's public domain C code in ECB mode and consumes 48 MB of memory.

The Gigabyte EX58-UD4 motherboard produced a 21261 score in AES benchmark, with the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 leading by this reference by an additional 1.27% while the ASUS P6X58D-Premium motherboard further extended performance.

The memory tests are included for illustration, since the system memory bandwidth offers a very minor impact on gaming performance and real-world experience. Nevertheless, it's evident from the results that not all motherboards respond to identical memory kits and settings in the same way.

The Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 motherboard delivered the best memory read, write, and copy performance of all motherboards tested, followed by the ASUS P6X58D-Premium and then the EX58-UD4 motherboard.

In summary, the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 delivered improved CPU performance of nearly 2% over the previous generation of Gigabyte X58 motherboards when BIOS settings were identical, and over 5% improvement to memory copy performance. Overall the performance between all X58-Express motherboards was extremely similar, as we should expect. Determining the 'best' motherboard will most likely come down to feature availability.

NOTICE: Because Award BIOS software is used on Gigabyte motherboards and American Megatrends is utilized by ASUS motherboard products, it's difficult to guarantee that processor and memory hardware configuration settings precisely match each other between manufacturers. Minor differences in clock speed rendering or deep-set advanced memory timing latency may account for performance differences within a small margin of error.

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