Gigabyte X99-SOC Champion & X99 Gaming 5P Haswell E Motherboards Reviewed

Name: Gigabyte X99-SOC Champion & X99 Gaming 5P Haswell E Motherboards Reviewed
Brand: Gigabyte

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, June 09, 2015, 10:28 AM EDT

For our next series of tests, we moved on to some more in-game benchmarking with Crysis and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. When testing processors with Crysis or ET:QW, we drop the resolution to 1024x768, and reduce all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible. However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for the games' physics engines and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually do place a load on the CPU rather than GPU.

Low-Resolution Gaming: Crysis and ET: Quake Wars

Taking the GPU out of the Equation

The two Gigabyte boards featured here finished right on-top of each other in the Crysis CPU benchmark, but trailed the Asus board just slightly. In the ET test, the Gaming 5P took the lead overall, but by a small margin.

Hi-Res Graphics Tests

3DMark and Unigine Heaven

Low-resolution game tests are a quick way to show what kind of throughput a processor is capable of in a gaming environment, but that's not how most gamers actually play games. Gamers like high-resolutions and maximum eye candy. With that in mind, we also ran a couple of demanding graphics/gaming-related benchmarks to see how the Core i7-5960X fared against the previous-gen Core i7-4960X, namely 3DMark and Unigine Heaven. For these tests, we popped a GeForce GTX Titan into the mix to minimize the GPU bottleneck.

2d1
2d2

In 3DMark, we saw similar scores across the board. The higher-clocks on the X79 / 4960X based system gave it a slight edge, but the X99-based rigs were all in-line.

Unigine Heaven told a somewhat different story. In this test, the Core i7-5960X / X99 combos put up better minimum frame rates, but its average was somewhat lower, again likely due to the 4960X's higher clocks.

Tags: Gigabyte, Motherboard, X99, haswelle, soc champion, gaming 5p

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com