ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte & MSI: Four Flagship X58 Motherboards Reviewed
by Rajinder Gill on July 15, 2010 10:00 PM ESTBased upon everything we’ve seen in our testing to date, our advice to users that already have enthusiast level first generation X58 motherboards is to think very carefully before laying down dollar on anything new – there are very few reasons to upgrade. In fact, even if buying a completely new system based around Bloomfield or Gulftown, there’s no need to fork out extra for any of these updated motherboard models unless there is something specific about board layout or multi-GPU abilities that appeals to you.
As we have to give a verdict, out of the four motherboards tested, we’d probably stretch ourselves to opt for the Rampage III Extreme in almost every scenario. While ASUS did not clean the floor in all departments, the R3E is easy to use, has a good BIOS, decent feature set and overclocks reasonably well. This doesn't mean to say that we feel the board is priced fairly though for what it offers. We'd like to see ASUS sell the R3E around the $300 mark considering there are no NF200 bridge chips cutting into base part costs.
We’d love to give the MSI XPower a global recommendation, but unfortunately can’t until the overclocking disparity we experienced against other boards both in voltage and frequency improves. While the XPower is cheaper than the other three boards on test and fares a lot better in power consumption tests, there are a plethora of boards under the $300 mark that can overclock better on air and water cooling (models from ASUS, Gigabyte & EVGA). Okay, you give up some of MSI’s bundle, but the extra peripherals don’t add up to much when high frequency low voltage operation is preferred by most users who purchase high-end memory kits.
If by some bizarre twist of fate we happened to be running four-way SLI and chasing big 3D Mark Vantage numbers (which is never going to happen), then our choice goes to EVGA. Yes, there is work to be done, but, we can’t find good enough reason to opt for Gigabyte’s UD9 instead. Simply because we feel Gigabyte have priced themselves out of the market and aren’t offering anything that we deem worth the price hike.
Looking past SATA 6G and USB3, all this second wave of flagship motherboard releases boils down to for ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI is the re-designed PWM; earlier models lacked sufficiently engineered VRMs to handle Gulftown and keep up with the EVGA Classified boards when pushed hard by the benchmarking crowd when using LN2 cooling. And that’s why there’s no need to upgrade or jump on the bandwagon unless you fall into the category of a niche group of users.
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strikeback03 - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
So that people don't go spending their money on them? IMO a review that says "This isn't worthwhile" is more useful than one that says something is. And this is probably a valid question for those still buying X58.shin0bi272 - Saturday, July 17, 2010 - link
good point. Better to have a review that says youre nuts to buy this than say wow this is a great board go get it now then in 4 months a new socket comes out and youre pissed off. I emailed intel and begged them to stop changing their sockets so soon ... I wont get a reply.Juddog - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
They don't show a picture of the setup, but I'm wondering why they didn't mention some of the extra abilities of the MSI board, such as the two 8 pin power inputs, the dip switches for voltage limiters, etc..I have the board myself and didn't notice the memory issues listed in the article, so I'm just wondering if they could go into more detail about testing methodologies in this regard.
Rajinder Gill - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
Hi,All of these boards have two power plugs - they are of no consequence unless you are pulling well over spec via the EPS 12V, which rules out the air/water cooling stuff. For the cascade cooled benchmarking we used our 1200w Turbo Cool which has two EPS 12V plugs - made no difference to any board for overclocking margin.
As for the memory testing detail leading to the discovery of high VTT etc: All memory sub-timings were tried both at vendor defaults (apart from the very loose B2B CAS delay MSI default to - spacing back to back reads by 13~14 clocks, which is terrible for performance) and also matched to a looser set at which all other boards passed the stress testing. RTL parameters were adjusted from base to see if it helped the MSI board. Unfortuantely, nothing worked, and that's on two boards. The issues have been reported back to MSI and they are aware. If you head over to XS forums and HWbot you will see others reporting similar issues – we are not alone.
Ragards
Raja
Juddog - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
Good response, thank you. :)Question - did it make a big difference on the MSI board using the black memory slots versus the blues?
Rajinder Gill - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
You cannot use the blue slots without populating the black - IMC limitation.Regards
Raja
Juddog - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
Is it ok for me to link the thread at HWBOT?http://hwbot.org/forum/showthread.php?t=7155
Like you said, it appears that only some have this issue where others do not, very strange indeed. Some people in that thread mention your exact same issue, one of the replies states they replaced the motherboard for another and the new one didn't have the issue, very strange. Thanks again for the good work.
dia - Saturday, July 17, 2010 - link
Juddog. You must be a re-seller, how can anyone that has the board not know about X58 and memory slot use?zero2dash - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
The only board I'd consider spending this type of megabucks on would be the (EVGA Classified) SR-2 and that would be just because I've really gotten into Folding@home over the last year.If I didn't already put together 2 X58/i7 systems, I'd get an SR-2 today.
LoneWolf15 - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
I can't see why I'd dump my Gigabyte EP-45 UD3P, 8GB of RAM, and Q9650 clocked at 3.6GHz for all of this when Sandy Bridge is just around the corner, which won't even use Socket 1156 or 1366.My rig performs somewhere between an i5-750 and an i7-920. I still can't believe how insane Socket 1366 boards are compared to previous-generation equipment.