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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Etern205 - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
People who get this all they cared about is the amount of nonsense that's place on these board and the size of their e-penis without any thought as to whether spending this much will bring the same in return.SniperWulf - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
It's official, Gigabyte is officially off their rocker!Now I get that they don't expect to sell these to everyone, but still for what you get, it's totally not worth it. I bet this board still has crappy fan controls too...
MGSsancho - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
Could you tell up what ACPI version these mobos use? I was able to find out the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 uses ACPI 1.0b but c'mon people version 4 is out. I have gone to every common mobo website and there is no board that supports anything higher than 2. Supermicro does sell version 3.0 and 4.0 on their latest offerings. ACPI is important to those of use who run other Operating systems and want to be able to use all those fancy power saving features with out drivers.Having many PCIE lanes is awesome for those of us into making file servers. But I suppose I am just better off with a server mobo, ECC ram and its better features
xetura - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
These I7 setups are great and all, but they're still way too expensive. My q6600@3.6ghz still does just fine. I can't justify spending $650 for a mobo, cpu and ram setup that doesn't perform that much better than my setup. Sure, if I had SLI or XFIRE it will be a big jump, but I don't have either.Finally - Saturday, July 17, 2010 - link
...when was the last time, AT reviewed an AMD chipset board?4 (!) months ago. Just click on the big "motherboard" button above.
Check out the ratio Intel:AMD...
Funnily enough the last AMD board had its price right in the title: $140!
...seriously, guys. If you have to admit to yourselves, that you are running out of Intel board to review, MAYBE test something I'm actually interested in.
tercathian - Sunday, July 18, 2010 - link
Yeah, 19 of 20 reviews on Intel, some as multiple boards (just on the first/latest directory page). 1 AMD board review????Balance, AT, Balance!
What are the good, the bad, the great, and the ugly of AMD boards out there currently?
ggathagan - Sunday, July 18, 2010 - link
So...What was your translation of the first paragraph of the article?
You know, where Raja stated:
"Thus far, we’ve spent most of 2010 focusing on mainstream segments for our motherboards reviews, there’s more of that to come over the next few months starting off with a long overdue focus on AMD"
MaxMax - Saturday, July 17, 2010 - link
WTF !!$700 for a motherboard ?!
What so special about it even $200 - $250 motherboards bypass it !!
It is not even fit in my Coolermaster HAF 932 case !!
They got mad !!
MacGyverSG1 - Monday, July 19, 2010 - link
I have read a few reviews and I think the memory problem might only affect the early production boards. I noticed in your pictures, and you stated, that the SATA 6GB/s ports are facing up. Other reviews have pictures that show the SATA 6GB/s ports at a 90 degree angle like the rest. I also was able to see that that board was v1.1. Maybe you have a v1.0 board that had problems that were fixed with v1.1?Rajinder Gill - Monday, July 19, 2010 - link
Hi,The rev 1.0 change is an input inductor change (to support the OCP increase), a default OCP for VCC increase to 360 amps. plus a small change for PSU startup. These modifications were performed by MSI (by hand) to our second board before they shipped it out to us. Further, there are retail consumers with rev 1.1 boards reporting memory issues like ours.
Hope this helps.
-Raja