ASUS Maximus V Gene vs. Gigabyte G1.Sniper M3 Review
by Ian Cutress on May 13, 2013 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gigabyte
- Asus
- MicroATX
- Z77
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with 1250W Gold Power Supplies.
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with the memory kits.
Thank you to ASUS for providing us with the AMD GPUs and some IO Testing kit.
Thank you to ECS for providing us with the NVIDIA GPUs.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with the Corsair H80i CLC.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with the 500W Platinum Power Supply for mITX testing, BlackHawk Ultra, and 1600W Hercules PSU for extreme dual CPU + quad GPU testing, and RK-9100 keyboards.
Software and BIOS
Normally as part of a review we would examine the Software and BIOS of each motherboard. Both the ASUS and Gigabyte boards have bigger brothers, wherein we tested and analyzed the offerings from both manufacturers. Please click to link through to the ASUS ROG MVF Software and BIOS analysis, or the Gigabyte G1.Sniper 3 Software and BIOS analysis.
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, while in a dual 7970 GPU configuration. 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.
While this method for power measurement may not be ideal, and you feel these numbers are not representative due to the high wattage power supply being used (we use the same PSU to remain consistent over a series of reviews, and the fact that some boards on our test bed get tested with three or four high powered GPUs), the important point to take away is the relationship between the numbers. These boards are all under the same conditions, and thus the differences between them should be easy to spot.
One would expect power consumption of smaller motherboards to be less than that of full sized ATX ones – in the case of the Sniper M3 at idle that is true, but when it is loaded with two GPUs during Metro2033, it matches some of the high end ATX models, and moreso than the full G1.Sniper 3. This could perhaps be related to the audio solution.
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.
Neither motherboard is able to hit a glorious 12 seconds for Windows 7 POST times with two GPUs installed.
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Speedgod66 - Thursday, May 16, 2013 - link
as an owner of the g1 sniper m3 I have to say some of your comments are valid -should have more sata ports very annoying , pciex 8x x8 layout is brilliant no card overheating running 2 evga 680 classifieds -but the sound for gaming is underestimated it is fantastic and gives you positional awareness of your enemy better than the Asus I have the maximus 1V genieZ and Maximus 1V extreme Z in other systems -love the extra features -but still anyone looking the sniper is great for gaming -posters a waste of time