The Microsoft Excel 2010 benchmark favored the Asrock X79 Extreme9, though if you look at the results the Asus P9X79 Deluxe was just a 10th of a second slower, and this trend continued with the MSI, ECS and Intel boards.

We did see a little bit of a variance in our custom 700MB compression test, as the MSI X79A-GD65(8D) was quite slow. The majority of the X79 boards took just 92–93 seconds opposed to the 96 seconds it took the MSI board.

The Photoshop CS5 test was completed within 16 seconds on all X79 boards, though it was the ECS X79R-AX that posted the best result. The Gigabyte G1.Assasin 2 and Asrock X79 Extreme 9 were the slowest boards in this test, while the MSI X79A-GD65(8D) wasn’t much faster.