Six $200-$260 LGA 2011 Motherboards, Reviewed
Features
published
We know that Intel's X79 Express platform hosts the fastest desktop processors in the company's portfolio. But can it be made more affordable? We round up the least-expensive $200-$260 motherboards to determine how much you have to give up for cheap X79.
Benchmark Results: Productivity
Performance differences in Adobe Photoshop are too small to detect during a one-minute project.
Biostar picks up a miniscule lead in 3ds Max.
Two of the three leaders from our audio encoding benchmarks retake top positions in file compression.
Biostar’s TPower X79 picks up its second productivity win in ABBYY FineReader.
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Current page: Benchmark Results: Productivity
Prev Page Benchmark Results: Audio And Video Encoding Next Page Power, Heat, And EfficiencyThomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.
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41 Comments
Comment from the forums
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I like Asrock boards. I have an 880GM-LE mATX and a Z68 Pro3 Gen3 ATX and both are good performance and price-performance wise.Reply
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hellfire24 Asrock is dominating both high end and mid range market.extreme3/gen3 1155 is awesome and cheapest pci-e 3.0 sli capable mobo.Asrock FTW!!!Reply -
Achoo22 Quite simply, the costs associated with Sandy Bridge-E are higher, in part because of Intel's prices and also because the boards are more difficult to design.
Since the boards all have vastly superior profit margins, your statement is misleading. Why is everyone too afraid to reveal the truth about motherboard pricing? -
AlexIsAlex Would it be possible, in future motherboard reviews, to include a measure of the cold boot (POST) time? This is something that different bioses can be differentiated on, and UFEI offers the potential for very fast boots if manufacturers take advantage of it properly.Reply
A comparison of the time between the power button being pressed and the installed bootloader starting would be very interesting to me. I was thinking it might be easiest to measure this by having no OS on the boot media and measuring the time to the "please insert boot media" message, but I'm sure you can think of other ways of doing it.
I'm also informed that on some boards the boot time varies dramatically dependent on whether any Overclocking is enabled, as compared to the stock settings - that would also be worth knowing. -
americanbrian your feature table says the asrock extreme 4 comes with an 8 phase voltage regulator, but the text of article says 10 phase...which is it ?Reply -
KT_WASP crisan_tiberiuASRock = ASUSReply
not anymore, asrock is no longer affiliated with Asus and is owned by Pegatron Corp. -
memadmax I wish tom's would do a "best motherboards for the money" or something close to that.Reply