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Gordon's freestyle technique is decent, but next time he decides to fling mobos, we want to see him do a thumber backhand, or better yet, a skip shot.
Ready to finally build your post-recession machine?
That’s good, because we’ve decided to round up the best and brightest motherboards available. And we’re not talking Micro ATX, sub-$100 budgetrino boards here. We reached for the most feature-filled, over-the-top X58 and 890FX boards from the top three mobo vendors.
Want to know how over the top? One board lets you remotely reboot or overclock it using your cell phone. Another features power connectors usually found only on dual-processor server motherboards. Hell, one has a heat pipe so freaking big, some editors here thought it was some sort of new PCI-E add-in card. And one board is so large, you’ll have to buy a case specifically for its generous dimensions.
So if you’re ready to build a machine that will motor you away from those recession doldrums, keep reading because the best board here will be the one you want in your AMD or Intel machine.
With performance essentially equal, it comes down to overall experience
We know, enthusiasts like to see benchmarks and measurements and numbers. But, as we’ve observed for a long time, performance across the same chipset rarely sees major variances. That lesson is evident here, where there’s no clear performance winner. Each board scored minor victories that were most likely the result of a benchmark’s margin of error and/or each board’s out-of-the-box overclock. The Gigabyte board, for example, runs its bclock at 134.9, which gives it a slight clock-speed advantage. Still, all the boards are fast.
In the overclocking department, we didn’t try to wring each board to its fullest potential manually, as that’s dependent on the individual overclocker. We did, however, test how each board handled automatic overclocking. Interestingly, all three were pretty safe automatic overclocks, taking our 2.8GHz Core i7-930 to the 3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition range without fail. Of course, everyone knows that’s a pretty wimpy feat. All three companies are simply being realistic. Folks who use the automatic tools will be happy with what they get but anyone who buys a board designed to boot with frigid liquid-nitrogen is going to overclock manually.
So, what this comes down to are features and the setup experience. Surprisingly, with the amount of engineering and qualification that goes into the top-tier boards, not everything is perfect. The Gigabyte X58A-UD7 was probably the trickiest. Out of the box, with the latest public BIOS and a retail Core i7-930, the board kept falling back to a 15x multiplier, which made our 2.8GHz chip a 2GHz chip. And no, it wasn’t in SpeedStep mode. That won’t trip up an enthusiast, but Joe 12-pack might not know he’s underclocking a chip. Only manually setting the multiplier to 22x gave us the right clock speed.
The Gigabyte’s ET6 utility also kept tripping Windows 7’s UAC control on each boot. Another kvetch about the Gigabyte board: It’s qualified for tri-SLI and includes a bridge, but you will need a special case to accept the last card. Both MSI’s and Asus’s tri-SLI configurations should fit in most standard enclosures.
Not that the MSI and Asus boards were without fault. As we noted above, MSI’s default power configuration was plain wacky. Requiring a user who has just spent a ton of cash on a top-tier board to enable S3 and tweak two power settings to enable “wake on USB” seems wrong. Granted, at $300 on the street, MSI’s board is the cheapest of the three here. And we do dig the Big Bang’s PCI-E layout and surface-mounted controls.
As for the Rampage III, Asus needs to send its north-bridge fan design back to the drawing board. Besides it not working with large coolers, the fan is shrill and prevents you from reaching the top GPU latch with your fingers. And how ’bout another USB header? The other two boards here pack two USB headers for case front-panel ports, but Asus only gives you one.
In the end, though, those are pretty minor complaints. It was a very close competition between Asus’s Rampage III Extreme and MSI’s Big Bang-XPower, but the RC Bluetooth mode and out-of-the-box flawless setup give the Rampage III Extreme the edge.
| Gigabyte X58A-UD7 | MSI Big Bang-XPower | Asus Rampage III Extreme | |
|---|---|---|---|
| PCMark Vantage 64-bit Overall | 8,993 | 8,903 | 8,940 |
| Everest Ultimate Mem Read (MB/s) | 14,618 | 15,406 | 14,628 |
| Everest Ultimate Mem Write (MB/s) | 12,076 | 14,776 | 12,194 |
| Everest Ultimate Mem Copy (MB/s) | 16,470 | 17,036 | 17,062 |
| Everest Ultimate Mem Latency (ns) | 59.8 | 60.2 | 60.5 |
| SiSoft Sandra RAM Bandwidth (GB/s) | 22.8 | 22.6 | 23 |
| 3DMark Vantage Overall | 15,549 | 15,211 | 15,443 |
| 3DMark Vantage GPU | 14,643 | 14,415 | 14,640 |
| 3DMark Vantage CPU | 18,618 | 18,227 | 18,483 |
| Valve Particle test (fps) | 149 | 144 | 149 |
| Resident Evil 5 low-res (fps) | 130.2 | 128.2 | 126.7 |
| HAWX low-res (fps) | 175 | 177 | 174 |
| HD Tune Pro Sustained Write (MB/s) | 98.9 | 102 | 102 |
| HD Tune Pro Burst (MB/s) | 136.7 | 136.7 | 172 |
Best scores are bolded. We outfitted all three motherboards with an Intel 2.8GHz Core i7-930, 6GB of Corsair DDR3/1333, a VisionTek Radeon HD 5850, a ThermalRight Ultra-120, a Western Digital 1TB Caviar Black, and Windows 7 Professional.
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December 07, 2011 at 9:58am
I've never worked with an AMD board before and I noticed all the ones pictured have the CPU heatsink mounting brackets attached already while none of X58 boards do.
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September 25, 2011 at 2:55am
msi seems to be the winner but i have a bad history with them most of my MSI boards only last a year!
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September 13, 2011 at 8:35pm
Such an expensive board but it only has 1 USB and 1 eSATA header (which are intended for the optional USB/eSATA PCI adapter). If your case (i.e. Coolermaster Sniper) has four front USB connectors and an eSATA connector then, you will need to purchase additional parts (i.e. NZXT Internal USB HUB) to utilize all the USBs. I didn't find the NZXT hub compatible with several USB devices.
Optional Northbridge thermal module not compatible with my Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler.
The Northbridge runs extremely hot (140F) with passive cooling.
I took the thermal module to the grinder (to mod it) so I could use the supplied fan and my Noctua cooler.Overall the board was easy to overclock and is extremely stable.
I think this board is a bit over priced.
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August 26, 2011 at 3:41am
Hi,
Any chance to get review on Asus P6T WS Professional Intel X58 or its latest MRP ? And can you pleasse review it for me.
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bran6141
July 17, 2011 at 2:31am
I saw that the post was updated almost a year ago. Can we have some updates on the present Motherboards?
softwaredev
August 03, 2011 at 11:34am
If you want to buy a motherboard at this moment I recommend you Asus P6T WS Professional Intel X58 with Chipset Intel Socket 1366 DDR3 ATX. I prefer Asus brand cause I have nice experience in my last 8 years with it and also software drivers are every time compatible with new O.S.
Cheers,
Viktor Software Developer at www.emailmarketingsoftwares.org
softwaredev
August 03, 2011 at 11:34am
If you want to buy a motherboard at this moment I recommend you Asus P6T WS Professional Intel X58 with Chipset Intel Socket 1366 DDR3 ATX. I prefer Asus brand cause I have nice experience in my last 8 years with it and also software drivers are every time compatible with new O.S.
Cheers,
Viktor Software Developer at www.emailmarketingsoftwares.org
