Giving the "worst performing" board a score of "one" (100%) allows an easy calculation of performance gained by choosing a faster board. For example, a motherboard that shows 101.78% is 1.78% faster than the slowest competitor.

It appears that MSI and Asus lead gaming, but let's not jump to any conclusions yet...

MSI and Asus again appear to lead in applications, but be forewarned...

Synthetics show how well a system should perform in theory, but before we get to practice...

MSI's overall lead of 1.13% from the "slowest" board looks impressive, but the board was not stable at default settings. It required tweaking just to finish benchmarks at stock speed, such as additional chipset and RAM voltage compared to the other boards. It also required more added cooling simply to stay up, so serious buyers should probably throw out the benchmark results until this "top performer" is closer to retail-ready stability!

That could leave Asus in the lead, but this most recent BIOS version (901) has it running at 267.3 MHz base clock, rather than the standard 266.7 MHz. That doesn't sound like a big boost, but calculating its 0.55% lead against the clock speed difference brings it to 0.32% above the IN9 32X-MAX, on par with Gigabyte's GA-N680SLI-DQ6.

I'm not ready to call MSI and Asus cheaters just yet, as MSI is still making final adjustments to its P6N Diamond. But considering motherboard integrity rather than brand politics, the ECS PN2 SLI2+ is the actual performance winner.