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
People who get this all they cared about is the amount of nonsense that's place on these board and the size of their e-penis without any thought as to whether spending this much will bring the same in return.SniperWulf - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
It's official, Gigabyte is officially off their rocker!Now I get that they don't expect to sell these to everyone, but still for what you get, it's totally not worth it. I bet this board still has crappy fan controls too...
MGSsancho - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
Could you tell up what ACPI version these mobos use? I was able to find out the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 uses ACPI 1.0b but c'mon people version 4 is out. I have gone to every common mobo website and there is no board that supports anything higher than 2. Supermicro does sell version 3.0 and 4.0 on their latest offerings. ACPI is important to those of use who run other Operating systems and want to be able to use all those fancy power saving features with out drivers.Having many PCIE lanes is awesome for those of us into making file servers. But I suppose I am just better off with a server mobo, ECC ram and its better features
xetura - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
These I7 setups are great and all, but they're still way too expensive. My q6600@3.6ghz still does just fine. I can't justify spending $650 for a mobo, cpu and ram setup that doesn't perform that much better than my setup. Sure, if I had SLI or XFIRE it will be a big jump, but I don't have either.Finally - Saturday, July 17, 2010 - link
...when was the last time, AT reviewed an AMD chipset board?4 (!) months ago. Just click on the big "motherboard" button above.
Check out the ratio Intel:AMD...
Funnily enough the last AMD board had its price right in the title: $140!
...seriously, guys. If you have to admit to yourselves, that you are running out of Intel board to review, MAYBE test something I'm actually interested in.
tercathian - Sunday, July 18, 2010 - link
Yeah, 19 of 20 reviews on Intel, some as multiple boards (just on the first/latest directory page). 1 AMD board review????Balance, AT, Balance!
What are the good, the bad, the great, and the ugly of AMD boards out there currently?
ggathagan - Sunday, July 18, 2010 - link
So...What was your translation of the first paragraph of the article?
You know, where Raja stated:
"Thus far, we’ve spent most of 2010 focusing on mainstream segments for our motherboards reviews, there’s more of that to come over the next few months starting off with a long overdue focus on AMD"
MaxMax - Saturday, July 17, 2010 - link
WTF !!$700 for a motherboard ?!
What so special about it even $200 - $250 motherboards bypass it !!
It is not even fit in my Coolermaster HAF 932 case !!
They got mad !!
MacGyverSG1 - Monday, July 19, 2010 - link
I have read a few reviews and I think the memory problem might only affect the early production boards. I noticed in your pictures, and you stated, that the SATA 6GB/s ports are facing up. Other reviews have pictures that show the SATA 6GB/s ports at a 90 degree angle like the rest. I also was able to see that that board was v1.1. Maybe you have a v1.0 board that had problems that were fixed with v1.1?Rajinder Gill - Monday, July 19, 2010 - link
Hi,The rev 1.0 change is an input inductor change (to support the OCP increase), a default OCP for VCC increase to 360 amps. plus a small change for PSU startup. These modifications were performed by MSI (by hand) to our second board before they shipped it out to us. Further, there are retail consumers with rev 1.1 boards reporting memory issues like ours.
Hope this helps.
-Raja