X58 for the Masses: Gigabyte's EX58-UD3R & EX58-UD4P
Testing Setup & SANDRA Benchmarks
How we configured our test systems: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory for DDR3-1066 with 7-7-7-20 timings. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
Motherboards: Components:
HotHardware's Test Systems
Intel Inside
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P
MSI Eclipse
ASUS Rampage II Extreme
Processor:
Intel Core 2 i7 920
(2.66GHz - Quad-Core)
RAM:
3x1GB Qimonda DDR3-1066
CL 7-7-7-20 DDR3-1066
GeForce 8800 GTS 512
Onboard Ethernet
Onboard Audio
Hard Drive:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
7,200 RPM SATAII
OS / Drivers
Windows Vista Ultimate
INTEL INF Update v9.1.0.1007
NVIDIA Forceware v175.19
|
|
|
We started off our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2009, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2009 suite on the test motherboards (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multi-Media, and Memory).
It was a clean sweep of SANDRA's CPU performance testing for the Gigabyte duo, as the UD3R and UD4P jockeyed about for which of the two boards would come out on top in each test. Memory performance was as expected, with results that matched up with a reference X58 board, for the most part.
