Gigabyte GA-7PESH1 Review: A Dual Processor Motherboard through a Scientist’s Eyes

Many thanks to...

We must thank the following companies for kindly donating hardware for our test bed:

OCZ for donating the Power Supply and USB testing SSD
Micron for donating our SATA testing SSD
Kingston for donating our ECC Memory
ASUS for donating AMD GPUs
ECS for donating NVIDIA GPUs

Test Setup

Power Consumption

Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply, with a single 7970 GPU installed.  This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, which is suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading.  This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency.  These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.

Using two E5-2690 processors would mean a combined TDP of 270W.  If we make the broad assumption that the processors combined use 270W under loading, this places the rest of the motherboard at around 110-130W, which is indicated by our idle numbers (despite PSU efficiency). 

POST Time

Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized.  A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized).  As part of our testing, we are now going to look at the POST Boot Time - this is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.)  These results are subject to human error, so please allow +/- 1 second in these results.

The boot time on this motherboard is a lot longer than anything I have ever experienced.  Firstly, when the power supply is switched on, there is a 30 second wait (indicated by a solid green light that turns into a flashing green light) before the motherboard can be switched on.  This delay is to enable the management software to be activated.  Then, after pressing the power switch, there is around 60 seconds before anything visual comes up on the screen.  Due to the use of the Intel NICs, the LSI SAS RAID chips and other functionality, there is another 53 seconds before the OS actually starts loading.  This means there is about a 2.5 minute wait from power at the wall enabled to a finished POST screen.  Stripping the BIOS by disabling the extra controllers gives a sizeable boost, reducing the POST time by 35 seconds.