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Published: January 5, 2009 | Source: Gigabyte | Author: Rich Weatherstone

Gigabyte EX58-UD5 X58 Motherboard

Test Setup
 

To ensure that all reviews on Overclock3D are fair, consistent and unbiased, a standard set of hardware and software is used whenever possible during the comparative testing of two or more products. The configuration used in this review can be seen below: 

 
Processor: Intel Core i7 920 (2.66Ghz)

Motherboard: Gigabyte EX58-UD5

Memory: Corsair Dominator @ 8-8-8-24 1600Mhz

Graphics Card: NVidia GTX280

Power Supply: Gigabyte Odin 1200W

CPU Cooling: Stock Intel Cooling

Hard Disk: Hitachi Deskstar 7K160 7200rpm 80GB

Graphics Drivers: Geforce 180.60 CUDA

Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1

 

During the testing of the setup above, special care was taken to ensure that the BIOS settings used matched whenever possible. A fresh install of Windows Vista was also used before the benchmarking began, with a full defrag of the hard drive once all the drivers and software were installed, preventing any possible performance issues due to leftover drivers from the previous motherboard installations. For the 3DMark and gaming tests a single card configuration was used.

To guarantee a broad range of results, the following benchmark utilities were used:


Synthetic CPU Test
• Sisoft Sandra 2009
• PassMark CPU test
• SuperPI 1m, 8m, 32m

Memory Test
• Sisoft Sandra 2009
• Everest 4.60

File Compression & Encoding
• Sisoft Sandra 2009
• 7-Zip File Compression
• River Past ViMark

Disk I/O Performance
• HDTach 3.0.4.0
• Sisoft Sandra 2009

3D / Rendering Benchmarks
• Cinebench 10
• 3DMark 05
• 3DMark 06
• 3DMark Vantage

3D Games
• Crysis
• Far Cry 2
• Company of Heroes

Overall System Performance
• PCMark Vantage

Power Consumption

Power consumption is an aspect often forgotten when it comes to enthusiast motherboards but in todays climate, with rising utility bills special consideration needs to be taken when choosing you components as over a period of time, one components can prove to be much more expensive than another over its lifetime.

Power consumption was measured at the socket using a plug-in mains power and energy monitor. Idle readings were taken after 5 minutes in Windows. Load readings were taken during a run of 3DMark Vantage.

 

Here we see the Gigabyte splitting the two other boards on test in the idle consumption test which is a little disappointing given the noise Gigabyte are making about Ultra Durable 3, but it does use the least amount of power when under load. Consideration should also be given to the fact that no software based power saving utilities were used during the testing. Gigabyte’s own ‘6 Gear’ power phase switching utility,  would no doubt decrease consumption even more which is quite an achievement and the figures above should certainly give the 1kW PSU buyers food for thought. 

Overclocking

Using a respectable Vcore of 1.40v, the remainder of BIOS voltage settings were left in their stock state to ensure equality throughout the testing.

sub10
The maximum Base Clock I managed was a respectable 200 but, and it is a very big but, this setting was achieved with no further tweaks other than raising the Vcore to 1.4v. Raising the vcore any higher didn’t have any affect and in a vain attempt to eek a little more performance out of the little 920 I raised the QPI voltage but sadly neither voltage increase would help stabilise the setup. Perhaps a little more tweaking with the multipliers would gain a higher Bclk speed but for now I was very impressed with a sub 10 second SuperPI run thanks to the Intel TurboTech setting. This increased the multi by one and resulted in a maximum clockspeed of 4200Mhz. All this was on the stock cooler too which couldn’t handle the heat of a Prime95 run, reaching temperatures of 90c+ before I called it a day.

Impressive results indeed beating our previous top clocker, the Asus P6T by a solid 200Mhz. There is however a little stick in the mud and that is the failed overclock recovery. From time to time, the UD5 will refuse to power on after a failed overclock resulting in a need to unplug the power supply at the wall socket to get the board to boot up. This is despite there being an on board CMOS rest switch which does do its job, just not every time. I found this quite irritating and hopefully it will be ironed out in future BIOS releases.

Returning the settings back to their stock state and disabling the Turbotech setting we started our suite of benchmarks…

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