ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte & MSI: Four Flagship X58 Motherboards Reviewed
by Rajinder Gill on July 15, 2010 10:00 PM ESTFar Cry 2
Featuring fantastic visuals courtesy of the Dunia Engine, this game also features one of the most impressive benchmark tools we have seen in a PC game. For single GPU results we set the performance feature set to Very High, graphics to High, and enable DX10 with 2xAA. Multi card results are generated using Ultra High settings with 4XAA.
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II
We are big fans of the Warhammer franchise, especially Dawn of War II. One of the latest RTS games in our library is also one of the more demanding titles on both the CPU and GPU. We crank all options to Ultra, enable AA, and then run the built-in performance benchmark for our result.
Futuremark 3D Mark Vantage
We utilize the performance preset of Futuremark's 3D Mark Vanatge to compare 3-way SLI performance .
ASUS's R3E scores high consistently in all benchmarking tests thus far. The MSI turns in decent scores but comes in below the NF200 supporting boards when loaded with three GPUs. We're not sure on the exact cause though will conject that it's possibly down to PCIe bandwidth. Either way, the loss is not significant enough to warrant alarm at this point. The Gigabyte and EVGA boards are hampered slightly by the latency penalty of the NF200, and give up 3~5% of performance to the ASUS R3E under normal operating conditions.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
52 Comments
View All Comments
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?