We recently stumbled onto this great little tool called Kribi bench. It is a 3D rendering benchmark produced by the people at Adept Development. Kribi bench is an SSE aware software renderer where a 3D model is rendered and animated by the host CPU and the average frame rate is reported. Now the great thing is, it therefore bypasses the GPU... so everything is in direct relation to your memory and CPU.

We used two of the included models with this benchmark: a "Sponge Explode" model consisting of over 19.2 million polygons and the test suite's "City" model that is comprised of over 107 billion polygons. The score is the number of frames rendered per second, higher is better.

RAW processor performance is what this benchmark likes, and the ECS x58 doesn't have a problem with it at all.

3DMark06 CPU test

Well, everybody loves 3DMark06, and nowadays it's CPU limited, making it an excellent application to check CPU performance. The scores that you see obviously are the CPU test itself, not overall 3DMark06 scores. Leading performance for the ASUS mainboard, closely followed by ECS.