Shootouts

Return of the X58 - The Best from ASUS and Gigabyte

By Vincent Chang - 23 Mar 2010

BIOS Settings & Test Setup

BIOS Settings

As one may expect from premium, enthusiast-class boards like these, ASUS and Gigabyte come with extensive BIOS settings, more than the essential ones that we have listed below. So the compulsive tweaker will find much to like about these boards. We only managed to push the base clocks for the two boards to 220MHz, which is similar to previously tested X58 boards.   

BIOS Settings
O/C Settings ASUS P6X58D Premium Gigabyte X58A-UD7
Base Clock (MHz) 100 - 500 100 - 600
CPU Ratio 12 - 63 12 - 65
DRAM Frequency Auto, 800, 1066, 1333, 1600, 1866, 2133, 2400 800, 1066, 1333, 1600, 1867, 2133, 2400
Voltage Adjustments
  • CPU Voltage: 0.85 to 2.10V (0.00625V steps)
  • Memory Voltage: 1.2 to 1.90V (0.00625V steps)
  • IOH Voltage: 1.1 to 1.7V (0.02V steps)
  • ICH Voltage: 1.1 to 1.4V (0.10V steps)
  • CPU Voltage: 0.500 to 1.900 (0.00625V steps)
  • Memory Voltage: 1.300 to 2.600V (0.02V steps)
  • QPI/Vtt Voltage: 1.100 to 2.00V (0.02V steps)
  • IOH Core: 1.00 to 2.00V (0.02V steps)
Tested Overclock Settings Base Clock: 220MHz max Base Clock: 220MHz max

 

Test Setup

As we mentioned earlier, our goal was to accompany these high-end X58 motherboards with equally high-end components and to that end, we have included some of the latest hardware available. This means having a SATA 6Gbps hard drive, a Radeon HD 5870 graphics card and Windows 7 Ultimate among other things. Besides the two boards, a Gigabyte EX58-EXTREME is used as a baseline comparison. This is an older X58 board that doesn't get the SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 treatment, but it does have the latest BIOS and we don't expect the hard drive to make that much of a difference.

  • Intel Core i7-980X (@3.33GHz, Intel Turbo Boost, HyperThreading enabled)
  • 3 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 @ 7-7-20 CAS 7.0
  • Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB SATA 6Gbit/s hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB (Catalyst 10.2)
  • Intel INF 9.1.1.1025 and Intel Matrix Storage manager 8.9.0.1023 driver set
  • Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate

The following benchmarks were used:

  • BAPco SYSmark 2007 (version 1.05)
  • Futuremark PCMark Vantage (1.0.3.1)
  • Futuremark 3DMark Vantage (1.0.3.1)
  • SpecView Perf 9.0
  • Far Cry 2
  • World in Conflict
  • Crysis Warhead

 

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