Intel X58 Motherboard Roundup - What does $300 Get You?
by Gary Key on December 5, 2008 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
General Performance
Futuremark's PCMark Vantage x64 is probably the single most diverse set of benchmarks that can be run on a system to mimic real world usage scenarios. The TV and Movies, Gaming, and Music Suites can be frighteningly difficult to pass when a system is not set up correctly. We've had boards in the labs that will pass hours of Prim95 torture testing or OCCT that fail even the basic 30 minute run of PCMark Vantage, let alone the full 1 hour and 30 minute test run.
Although the scores are very close, the ASUS P6T-Deluxe offers a slight advantage in our system benchmark results thanks to slightly better video performance. The Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 scores very well in most of the individual tests except for the Music suite that features a heavy reliance on the CPU and HDD. The Gigabyte board scored low in the individual Media Center and Storage tests for an unknown reason that we are still investigating. The MSI Eclipse and EVGA X58 SLI also offer solid performance in these benchmarks. Our reference Intel board trails the other solutions due to video and memory performance. We had to run the Intel board at 6-6-6-24 memory timings compared to 6-5-5-15 1T timings due to stability problems in the TV and Movies test suite. However, a user would be hard pressed to actually tell the difference between any of the boards during actual usage.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
78 Comments
View All Comments
MarchTheMonth - Friday, December 5, 2008 - link
Let me just say this, i haven't read through the entire article yet (i'm on only the first page still), and for any motherboard maker to focus strictly on extreme overclocks is just stupid to me.I bought my system the day the core i7 was released, got the i7 920, asus mobo, and 6GB of memory (and honestly, I think most users buy 6GB of memory, i really dont think many people get 3GB), and i couldn't overclock because the only HSF i had was the stock one, and at 100% cpu usage, my processor was reaching 96-100C after 3 minutes. I dumbled down my usage to make sure that nothing was making the computer run above 80, and now that i have a noctua HSF, i havent seen anything above 65C (even with my overclock of only 3.33Ghz).
My point is, if all my mobo could do out of the box was do extreme overlocks and run really high scores in synthetic program X, I would have been pissed. This is my main system, I expect it to be 24/7/365 stable, and I expect the mobo makers to make a product to provide this.
bob4432 - Friday, December 5, 2008 - link
i don't care about superpi scores if my $300 m/b can't do prime95 for 1hr. reliability is key - number 1 importance.i have many friends that are always buying top of the line m/bs and when we game, they are always the first to drop out as their machines have crashed. my 1-2gen old chipsets that at may offer crossfire/sli or a raid able southbridge are always bulletproof and i just keep on gaming.
in reality, nobody really cares if your machine is 1-3% faster in either fps or superpi if the damn thing can't stay on for any amount of time or only 60% of its onboard items work.
good job to you guys for geting this point across, and it is nearly criminal that you have to talk to them nearly 1000 times to get stuff resolved, utterly ridiculous.
Prozin - Friday, December 5, 2008 - link
I am very impressed that somebody has finally addressed this issue because in my opinion this has been going on for a while now. The trend in the industry seems to be clear, many of the larger companies seem to be not only advertising their products overclocking abilities but also getting on board with standout people in the overclocking community. Keeping with your article I won't mention any names here but the marketing strategy seems to have paid off, but at the expense of working products unfortunately!As you mentioned in your article (and I agree) these companies should focus on at least getting the standard features working correctly before insuring that the motherboard will boot at FSB speeds in access of 600Mhz! Its seems to me that once they get all their features (at least the advertised features) working properly they could focus their time and energy on the motherboard's overclocking ability without having to worry about the multitude of RMA's because of non-boot issues or drives not being identified.
Unfortunately I'm not able to articulate my thoughts as well as you guys did but I think its great your changing your review process to help industry focus more on releasing a fully working product before releasing a product that can overclock well at the expense of everything else. Please keep up the great work because consumers like myself will be the first ones to benefit from it!
Degloriath - Friday, December 5, 2008 - link
Something seems wrong with this article, interesting as it is, there's multiple broken image links and the next page link breaks. Just thought I should give you an early heads up!sciwizam - Friday, December 5, 2008 - link
"(What do you think about doing this) (listing out problems encountered is a good idea, not crazy about the thank you Gary,but that is just me)"Notes?
Gary Key - Friday, December 5, 2008 - link
The rough draft went up instead of the final article, it is correct now. :)trailertrash - Sunday, December 7, 2008 - link
i just ordered the asus p6t mobo an 6 meg of corsair 3 chan. ram. after reading that the 3rd sticks not seen by vista 64 i felt a pain in my gut but after looking around people have fixed the issue by flashing the bios to 0804.P.s. i hope its that simple
TheBeagle - Saturday, December 6, 2008 - link
Gary,Once again you have done a very good service of objectively reviewing and evaluating the latest batch of high-end boards - Well Done! As for any minor editorial/typo annoyances, just ignore them for the most part, and fix the ones you choose in due course. Overall, it's an excellent review, and worthy of publication on AnandTech's front page. And for those who might criticize any portion of it - just have them post THEIR comprehensive review so we can all compare those editorial products.
Best regards and Merry Christmas! TheBeagle