Testing – Futuremark & Photoshop
Next I ran my favorite Futuremark gaming benchmarks, PCMark05, 3DMark06, PCMark Vantage, and 3DMark Vantage. Here the video cards came into play, so again keep in mind that the i7 870 rig was running a much more powerful video card than the older i7 920 rig.
Testing – Photoshop
Next I did some real world testing using Photoshop Bench by DriverHeaven.net. Photoshop Bench takes a .jpg and runs a series of 15 filters on it. Though there are 15 steps, I only showed the results of some of the longer ones, many of them only take a few seconds, not long enough to show real results.
Great review, but you forgot one important thing. You didn't mention anything about the bridge (PLX) chip and how it doesn’t provide extra DMI bus bandwidth, which can “potentially” bottleneck anything running off the P55 chipset, ie; anything running of X1's, your OS drive, etc.
Gigabyte's USB 3.0/Sata III solution is really the only viable one, as every other USB 3.0/Sata III mobo maker uses the PLX chip.
Great review, i have same mobo, with I7 in Windows 2003 server 32 bits, i experiment a poor perfomance of this system, what can cause this?, i have a raid 0 with 2 sata of 1 Tera, and 8 Gb RAM. I have windows 2003 r2 32 bits for exchange server 2003 do not support 64 bits 🙁
Note that the P7P55D-E (non-pro) and lower boards in this family do NOT have the PLX chip solution for USB 3 and SATA 3. For those boards, USB 3 and SATA 3 share PCIE bandwidth.