EVGA X58 SLI Micro LGA1366 Motherboard Review

Memory Benchmarks

Everest Ultimate is a very useful tool for any and all benchmarkers or overclockers. With the ability to read most voltage, temperature, and fan sensors on almost every motherboard available, Everest provides the ability to customize the outputs in a number of forms for display on your desktop. In addition to this, the memory benchmarking provides a useful tool of measuring the changes to your memory sub-system when tweaking to measure the differences.

The difference between our stock setup and the overclocked one is pretty drastic. Our CPU frequency goes from just over 3GHz to 4.33GHz. With an i7, that is a night and day difference that will lead to a substantial increase in CPU bound programs. Our memory increase from stock to overclocked isn't as significant, but the increase in CPU frequency and uncore speed aids the Everest bandwidth results showing a significant bandwidth increase across the board.

Keep in mind, we do have a 140MHz increase in memory clocks and the change from 6-7-6 to 7-7-6 isn't very big at all, tRCD dictates a lot of memory timing performance and that stays the same at 7 in both setups.

The latency numbers are also vastly improved due to a combination of CPU/uncore and memory frequency increases. The interesting performance increases between these setups will come in the system benchmarks, these memory results are pretty much expected.

SiSoft Sandra is a popular and well used benchmark in the industry but not really a friend of serious benchmarkers. The results SiSoft Sandra produces have been suspect at times basing the numbers it comes up with on system specs and not actual testing. The latest version of Sandra seems to be one of the few programs that appear to calculate memory bandwidth consistently so we decided to include it in today’s benchmarks. Like we have always said with SiSoft Sandra though, take these results for what they are and nothing more.

SiSoft Sandra bandwidth results are very similar to the Everest results showing a 19% increase in memory bandwidth going from our stock clocks to the overclocked settings. Considering our CPU is overclocked just over 40%, this bandwidth increase appears to be heavily dependent on the memory increase which is an increase in frequency of about 18%.

ScienceMark is an almost ancient benchmark utility at this point in time and hasn't seen an update in a long time. It is, however, still a favorite for accurately calculating bandwidth on even the newest chipsets.

The ScienceMark bandwidth numbers increase by almost 25% when looking at the overclocked bandwidth compared to the stock bandwidth. This indicates a little more influence in the results from the memory timings and/or the combination of CPU/uncore frequency increases. As it stands, our bandwidth numbers are about where we expected to see them with the overclocked setup displaying much higher memory bandwidth figures.