EVGA X79 Dark Motherboard Review

EVGA X79 Dark - X79 Chipset
Intel Core i7 3960x (3.3Ghz) Hex Core 6 x 256KB L2 Cache 15MB L3 Cache
Thermaltake Water 2.0 Pro
Custom Single Stage Phase Cooler (OC)
1x nVidia GTX 770
4x Corsair Dominator PC2133 16GB DDR3 (9-11-10-27)
Western Digital VelociRaptor 150gb SerialATA 10000RPM
LG 20x Super Multi GSA-H55L
Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 1050 Watt PSU
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

Asus ROG Rampage IV Extreme - X79 Chipset
Intel Core i7 3960x (3.3Ghz) Hex Core 6 x 256KB L2 Cache 15MB L3 Cache
Thermaltake Water 2.0 Pro
1x nVidia GTX 770
4x Corsair Dominator PC2133 16GB DDR3 (9-11-10-27)
Western Digital VelociRaptor 150gb SerialATA 10000RPM
LG 20x Super Multi GSA-H55L
Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 1050 Watt PSU
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

Our motherboard testing suite has been compiled to subject the system to a variety of different scenarios that help uncover some of the subtle differences in motherboard design.  Normally these differences are driven by the processor and BIOS programming but with the advent of an IMC and PCI Express moving to the CPU we have discovered that raw performance numbers are virtually identical across the systems.  

Our new approach is to look at total system performance and minimize the variances.  The results will tell us how the system responded as a total package and also give us something to use in our comparisons.

In this review we choose to match the EVGA X79 Dark up against the popular Asus Rampage 4 Extreme and retested everything so there were no variances in the hardware.  Considering that both of these motherboards were designed for similar purposes it should be a good matchup.