The GIGABYTE Server MW31-SP0 Motherboard Review: A Quick Look at C236
by Ian Cutress on April 21, 2016 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gigabyte
- Xeon
- Enterprise
- C236
CPU Performance, Short Form
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We leave the BIOS settings at default and memory at JEDEC (DDR4-2133 C15) for these tests, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. For HandBrake, we take a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short and convert it into an x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high-end platforms.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
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Samus - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
Ahh DFI, they sealed their fate in the consumer market with the Lanparty line, probably the most unreliable mainstream motherboards ever. It's hard to believe the same company made the legendary Infinity motherboards. Hopefully Supermicro doesn't do the same as they begin to enter the mainstream desktop board market...jabber - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
Hmmm not how I remember it at the time. Basically if you didn't have a 939 DFI SLi board in your system you just weren't serious. My 939 Lanparty board gave superb service for several years with a Opteron 180, 2GB DDR500, 2 x 7900GTX and a Raptor. Sure they were quirky to configure to get the best out of them but I don't remember them being unreliable, even as a Lanparty Forum member. Still it was 10 years ago.Samus - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
Depends which board you had. If you remember, the short lived nForce chipset through its 430 and 460 incarnations gave DFI a bad rap for reliability. The boards worked fine until they didn't. Most of the reviews were great initially until 2-3 years went by and the boards all started failing. It wasn't a DFI issue but DFI no doubt made more nForce boards than anybody for overclocking and the long term reliability of those chipset was terrible.The nForce4 goes down in history as one of the highest performing yet most unstable platforms ever. God forbid you actually loaded the nVidia disk controller drivers instead of using the Microsoft default. Except perhaps the Intel 815e and VIA southbridges, those were pretty terrible too.
Some chipsets get a bad rap for no reason though, even recalled ones like the Intel P67. I still have the early non-Ivy Bridge compatible version on an Intel board no less and it's been stable in my HTPC for 5 years running daily...it must have 50,000 hours on it by now.
DanNeely - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
Everyone's NF4 boards died like crazy though. That doesn't explain why some makers like DFI were destroyed by nVidia's fiasco, while the ones who're still around managed to avoid any reputational damage from it.jabber - Saturday, April 23, 2016 - link
I never had an issue with the nVidia SATA drivers. The only thing that screwed the build was the nVidia Network monitoring/security drivers. I used to help buddies with poor NF4 setups by asking first if they installed that. Yes they had. You only ever tried installing that crap once.danjw - Thursday, April 21, 2016 - link
In the chipset chart you have: "Supports Intel Xeon E5-1200 v5 CPUs" that should be "E3-1200 v5".sivaplus - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
Indeed. Just because I saw E5-12... I knew there is something fishy here :). Still E5-14xx support would have been nice at this price pointLord 666 - Thursday, April 21, 2016 - link
So frustrating to see the ram maxed out at 64gb. The x99 platform maxes out at 128gb. Hoping a x99 successor arrives supporting skylake CPUskgardas - Thursday, April 21, 2016 - link
Indeed, but this is Intel marketing. For more RAM on Xeon you need to go to D/E5 territory...SFNR1 - Friday, April 22, 2016 - link
Before the v5, there was a limit of 32GB so 64GB is a huge improvement here (finally), but yes, it's a pain. >ou would have to buy a Xeon E5 1x http://ark.intel.com/compare/82767,82766,82765,827... . That pricebump is insane.