Video Conversion and Synthetics
The X48 comparison motherboard battled the Asus Striker II Extreme for top honors in our video encoding suite, but the “losers” weren’t far behind.
Differences between DDR2 and DDR3 can’t explain away the huge memory bandwidth lead the 790i Ultra SLI has over the X48, as both were set to the same speed and timings. Even our best DDR3-equipped X48 motherboard didn’t exceed 6.5 GB/s using the same settings in our most recent X48 Motherboard Comparison, yet the 790i Ultra SLI averages 7.0 GB/s. Nvidia challenged Intel’s long-held memory controller throne, and it looks like we have a new king.