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
Anyone notice the dual 8-pin on the Asus?EVM - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
You guys make me laugh when you rip the makers of these boards!mobutu - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
You have to be really crazy to spend $700 on a motherboard, video card or cpu.Or, for that matter, on any single pc component.
Acanthus - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
This just in, 2 year old chipset performs identically to launch, give or take 1%.Intel needs to stop revoking the licenses of their competitors.
But then they couldn't have the best quarter ever during the worst economy in 70 years.
jonup - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
Actually economy is doing just fine. If it wasn't for cheating sovereign government in Europe and the resulting debt crisis we would have been doing even better.kallogan - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
I don't see the point really. They're just for geeky fanboys or benchmarks junky. Getting cheap computer parts and push them to their limits is a lot more fun ;-). Buying a celeron dual core E3200 and make it score more than a E8600, that is fun.It's like these memory kits :
Corsair Dominator GT 8-8-8-24 2200MHz 4GB kit
G.Skill Perfect Storm 8-8-8-24 2200MHz 4GB kit
.....
Dominator, perfect storm, extreme my a.... Everybody knows high-end memory kits are marketing jokes and brings absolutely nothing but 0,1 %.
Voldenuit - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
Honestly, I think reviewing these things is a waste of time.I'd rather see reviews of real products that real enthusiasts would buy. Don't they have sites dedicated to LN2/cascade cooling overclocking and hardware?
I'd never spend more than $200 on a motherboard, and something closer to $120 would be more like it. I'd also rather find out how the options in that price space would suit my needs rather than read about expensive, impractical halo products on a platform that is going to be obsoleted in a few months by Sandy Bridge anyway.
jonup - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
Man, this is like porn. It's what can't don't want to have, but like watching it anyways.Voldenuit - Saturday, July 17, 2010 - link
Nah, reading a $700 Thermaltake Level 10 case review is geekpr0n. A $700 motherboard based on a 2-year old chipset with no real performance or innovation gains is more like goatse. :pshin0bi272 - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
If they dont really do anything new/better performance wise (save for sata6g, and usb3) and intel is changing sockets with the sandy bridge later this year then what's the point of reviewing these now?