ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte & MSI: Four Flagship X58 Motherboards Reviewed
by Rajinder Gill on July 15, 2010 10:00 PM ESTSorenson Squeeze 6
We are using Sorenson Squeeze to convert eight AVCHD videos into HD Flash videos for use on websites. This application heavily favors physical core count and processor clock speed.
WinRAR 3.9 x64
This benchmark compresses our AT workload consisting of a main folder that contains 954MB of files in 15 subfolders. The result is a file approximately 829MB in size.
Bibble 5.0
We utilize Bibble Labs' Bibble 5 v2 to convert 50 RAW image files into full size JPEG images with the program's default settings. This program is fully multithreaded and multi-core aware.
File Transfer to USB
In this test we use La Cie’s Rugged USB 3.0 500GB external hard drive and transfer a 1GB file from a 1TB HDD connected to the Intel ICH monitoring the time taken.
Not much to remark on here other than the EVGA Classified's slow USB 2 performance. The USB 3 supporting boards are tied transfering files of this size. USB 3 is not a killer feature just yet, however, there's certainly scope to make large backups and system images in the fraction of the time it would take to complete the process over USB 2.
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strikeback03 - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
So that people don't go spending their money on them? IMO a review that says "This isn't worthwhile" is more useful than one that says something is. And this is probably a valid question for those still buying X58.shin0bi272 - Saturday, July 17, 2010 - link
good point. Better to have a review that says youre nuts to buy this than say wow this is a great board go get it now then in 4 months a new socket comes out and youre pissed off. I emailed intel and begged them to stop changing their sockets so soon ... I wont get a reply.Juddog - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
They don't show a picture of the setup, but I'm wondering why they didn't mention some of the extra abilities of the MSI board, such as the two 8 pin power inputs, the dip switches for voltage limiters, etc..I have the board myself and didn't notice the memory issues listed in the article, so I'm just wondering if they could go into more detail about testing methodologies in this regard.
Rajinder Gill - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
Hi,All of these boards have two power plugs - they are of no consequence unless you are pulling well over spec via the EPS 12V, which rules out the air/water cooling stuff. For the cascade cooled benchmarking we used our 1200w Turbo Cool which has two EPS 12V plugs - made no difference to any board for overclocking margin.
As for the memory testing detail leading to the discovery of high VTT etc: All memory sub-timings were tried both at vendor defaults (apart from the very loose B2B CAS delay MSI default to - spacing back to back reads by 13~14 clocks, which is terrible for performance) and also matched to a looser set at which all other boards passed the stress testing. RTL parameters were adjusted from base to see if it helped the MSI board. Unfortuantely, nothing worked, and that's on two boards. The issues have been reported back to MSI and they are aware. If you head over to XS forums and HWbot you will see others reporting similar issues – we are not alone.
Ragards
Raja
Juddog - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
Good response, thank you. :)Question - did it make a big difference on the MSI board using the black memory slots versus the blues?
Rajinder Gill - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
You cannot use the blue slots without populating the black - IMC limitation.Regards
Raja
Juddog - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
Is it ok for me to link the thread at HWBOT?http://hwbot.org/forum/showthread.php?t=7155
Like you said, it appears that only some have this issue where others do not, very strange indeed. Some people in that thread mention your exact same issue, one of the replies states they replaced the motherboard for another and the new one didn't have the issue, very strange. Thanks again for the good work.
dia - Saturday, July 17, 2010 - link
Juddog. You must be a re-seller, how can anyone that has the board not know about X58 and memory slot use?zero2dash - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
The only board I'd consider spending this type of megabucks on would be the (EVGA Classified) SR-2 and that would be just because I've really gotten into Folding@home over the last year.If I didn't already put together 2 X58/i7 systems, I'd get an SR-2 today.
LoneWolf15 - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
I can't see why I'd dump my Gigabyte EP-45 UD3P, 8GB of RAM, and Q9650 clocked at 3.6GHz for all of this when Sandy Bridge is just around the corner, which won't even use Socket 1156 or 1366.My rig performs somewhere between an i5-750 and an i7-920. I still can't believe how insane Socket 1366 boards are compared to previous-generation equipment.