SUBZERO BENCHMARKING with the Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6
The "official" release of Intel's X48 chipset is on the horizon, which means the major manufacturers are readying their products for release. We already have several X48 boards in-house that we are running through the paces and feel confident enough to start providing a few unique performance previews over the coming days.
The first board up is Gigabyte's GA-X48T-DQ6 that features DDR3 capabilities and a whole host of technology improvements such as Dynamic Power Saver (DPS), improved components and circuitry layout, auto DDR3-1900 overclocking via XMP, and 2-phase power designs for the X48 MCH chipset and memory slots. We will provide an overview into these features, BIOS design, and complete performance results in our next article, but for now, let's see how this board performs when pushed to the limit with our Cascade cooling setup.
Test Setup
| Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 Overclocking/Benchmark Testbed |
|
| Processor | Intel
Core 2 Quad QX9650 Quad Core, 3.0GHz, 2X6MB Cache, 9x Multiplier, 1333FSB |
| CPU Voltage | 1.80V |
| Cooling | Dual Cascades by LittleDevil & Johann Marais |
| Power Supply | PCP1200W |
| Memory | 2x1GB OCZ DDR3 PC3-14400 (DDR-1800) Platinum Edition |
| Memory Settings | Various |
| Video Cards | ASUS 8800 GTS 640MB |
| Video Drivers | NVIDIA 169.25 |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital 7200RPM 250GB SATA 3/Gbps 16MB Buffer |
| Optical Drives | Plextor PX-B900A, Toshiba SD-H802A |
| Case | open Test Bed - Dimastech Benching Station |
| BIOS | F3C |
| Operating System | Windows XP SP2 |
| . | |
We have been fortunate to spend the last few days benchmarking this board before feeling comfortable enough with the last BIOS release to use our cascade cooling setup. We initially started using an E6850 processor but found FSB limits a little lower than we had anticipated. Gigabyte sent us a number of BIOS revisions that greatly improved overclocking and memory timings, but we found that nothing over 540FSB on our E6850 would hold steady. This CPU managed between 540-570FSB on the Asus Maximus Extreme.
Although extreme benchmarking with our QX9650 Quad core CPU had not been pleasant for us in the past on a variety of different motherboards, we decided to have another run at achieving speeds that had previously eluded us on the X38 boards. Our QX9650 processor has a cold boot issue at -61 Celsius and idle shutdown temperature of -94. So we knew we would be in for a rough time cycling our cascades to remain below this boot-up temperature. Gigabyte's Easy Tune 5 software was very useful in helping us to maintain a steady evaporator temperature (below idle shutoff) by allowing us to adjust CPU Vcore on the fly in Windows. Without this ability, we would not have completed our benchmarks today. Let's take a quick look at our initial results.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
22 Comments
View All Comments
strikeback03 - Wednesday, December 26, 2007 - link
At this point I'd say both qualify at about the same level of usefulness - most people won't use IDE or floppy, a few will find them useful.OccamsAftershave - Thursday, December 27, 2007 - link
Completely disagree. This is an "enthusiast" board.No enthusiast needs a floppy -- except in the worst case of needed to get something off one from Grandma, and then they typically can get access to a flpy-drive somewhere else for transfer.
OTOH, many enthusiasts have legacy IDE drives in the X00's of gigs, still useful as databuckets.
Guid - Friday, December 28, 2007 - link
The floppy drive, lowly as it is, seems to come in handy only once in a a while. But when it does, I'm so very happy to have it.comnut - Wednesday, November 19, 2008 - link
yes, a floppy IS useful, until a PROPER FS is used for CDRs!!If you have crashed down to a dos prompt, you may be able to boot off your previously prepared CD, BUT if you forgot a few drivers or configs, you cannot 'just copy them on'...:(
If it is a floppy, it can be done in seconds...
strikeback03 - Thursday, December 27, 2007 - link
The only reason anyone needs a floppy these days is if a manufacturer didn't provide certain drivers via another method. The last DFI board I ordered had a floppy for RAID drivers IIRC.There are always external cases for old hard drives.
Maxim123 - Tuesday, December 25, 2007 - link
Great scores! What is your Vgpu for a card?Rajinder Gill - Tuesday, December 25, 2007 - link
1.55V for the GPU. I have been meaning to get around to the OVP modification and also Hipro-5's inductor mods to see if the card will go further...regards
Raja
ninjit - Tuesday, December 25, 2007 - link
Those Full desktop screenshots are really annoying (and not the way other articles in Anandtech are written).I realize this is just a quick-preview, but it would help a lot if you cropped those images to the relevant windows (or just do grabs of only the benchmark-windows in the 1st place).
It also looks a bit amateurish in light of the polished presentation of the rest of the article and website.
Rajinder Gill - Tuesday, December 25, 2007 - link
The extreme screenshots have to be taken this way - in order to make a submission to the Orb or Hwbot. Sorry you don't like them, but when a board is pushed hard we have to provide adequate proof.. Usually I cut them down further, but with a 4 program verification requirement there was little choice.The full article will feature graphs for the standard results. For extreme benches we stick with desktop shots..
regards
Raja
nullpointerus - Monday, December 24, 2007 - link
Do you have any pictures of the cooling setup?