Z68 vs. X58 - Which Is The Better Gaming Platform?

I do really hate posting this kinda stuff since I am both in awe and disgust that effort was put into an article like this.  My awe is that people will likely read this article so I'm a little mad that I didn't think of it first.   Sadly the conclusions drawn from this article are based on hardware assumptions using common software instead of software performance using common hardware.

(The first rule of scientific theory is, you will have a control for which to measure your performance against.  The second rule of scientific theory is, you will have a control for which to measure your performance against)

For instance this article starts out running 3D benchmarks attempting to determine a platform difference.  As anyone can glean from our motherboard reviews CPU power plays a big role in how fast GPUs can process the available data.  It is a no brainer that the faster clocked Z68 will always win despite the 8x/8x SLI config.  

This is an article I've wanted to do for a while now and as this month started, I told myself it was time to get it done as my testbeds here are making some changes. I've been tossing up if I should make the move to Z68 for our VGA reviews, or stick with the tried and trusted X58 platform. Most people will feel that it's a no brainer with the X58 being the better option due to the fact it natively supports x16 / x16 in dual card setups. For us, that's indeed the biggest draw for the platform; the Z68 one on the other hand has a lot of standout features that make it a better option as well."

The big thing is that the Z68 platform can just overclock so much better. Our X58 / 980X setup is good for 4.2GHz, while our Z68 / 2600k setup is good for 5.2GHz - 5.4GHz. With high end setups, it's so important that we're not CPU limited and even though the 2600k doesn't carry as many cores as the 980x, its +1GHz should yield us more headroom.

An accurate test would be to do something like what we did in our Multi GPU Index Introduction article where we matched CPU power across the different platforms to rule that out cpu speed as a contributing factor.  In doing so we saw the benefits of architecture over CPU technology which is what you need to determine a platform winner.

Related Web URL: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/4240/z68_vs_x58_...