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Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:30:00 -0600

A P55 motherboard that spares no amenity

If you thought Intel’s new budget Nehalem meant rock-bottom, feature-stripped motherboards to match, think again.

Gigabyte’s GA-P55-UD6 jams just about every feature you could think of into the new LGA1156 platform. There are the de rigueur updated power-saving utilities and the dual BIOS, which can save your bacon should your BIOS get corrupted.

And then there’s a whole kitchen sink of new features, such as the ability to secure the system using the onboard TPM module and then have it unlock when the computer detects your Bluetooth phone nearby. The same Bluetooth phone can also be used to put the system in standby or hibernate if you walk away, to save power.

Two other features are probably a bit more useful: As part of the board’s Smart Six apps, the BIOS QuickBoot feature allows you to set the BIOS to initialize much faster if no hardware has been changed. With the feature turned on, we saw the system go from a 30-second POST-to-OS load to 15 seconds. That’s pretty spectacular. The OS QuickBoot promises faster boots, too, but as far as we can tell, it’s simply a different way to invoke Vista’s Hybrid Sleep mode.

Gigabyte's P55 board is the first to sport six DIMM slots for the Core i5.

In the odd-feature department, the Smart Recorder function can log power ons and offs and which files are moved off of the computer. (Not trustful of your roommate?) Even odder is the Smart Dual BIOS feature that lets you store passwords and up to 12 important dates in the BIOS. Why? We don’t know.

On the physical front, the board ups the arms race in power regulation with a 24-phase power feature. A typical budget board features four-phase power circuits—Gigabyte says the 24-phase helps keep the board cooler by spreading the workload among more components and can also aid in delivering higher and more reliable voltage. Gigabyte also says it used two ounces of copper to build the traces in the board instead of the typical one ounce in budget boards. In theory, this should lower the resistance and also thermals.

Of course, there’s also 12 SATA ports (but no SATA 6) and eight USB ports (no USB 3.0), as well as SLI and CrossFire X support. Oh, and did we mention the six DIMM slots? That’s the feature that will get the most attention. Since Lynnfield is dual-channel, the majority of boards for the CPU feature four DIMM slots. The six-slots, though, aren’t as useful as you would think, right now. To populate all six, you must include four single-sided DIMMs. What that translates to with today’s RAM is four 1GB DDR3 sticks combined with, say, two 2GB DIMMs, for a total of 8GB. That’s the same as you would get from a four-slot board. The extra slots might be handy in 12 to 18 months, when RAM density has increased, but not today. We tested the GA-P55-UD6 with six DIMMS to see if populating all of the slots would hurt performance, and it didn’t. In fact, we saw slightly better performance with 8GB using six DIMMs than 8GB using four DIMMs.

We used the GA-P55-UD6 for the majority of our Lynnfield testing (November) and didn’t experience any issues, and performance was quite good when compared to X58 and i920.

Even the cost of the board is quite acceptable. If this were an X58 board, it would push $350, but at $240 MSRP the GA-P55-UD6 is a decent value. The fact that the board is currently selling for more than it lists tells you how hot is right now.

MSI DKA790GX Platinum

Gordon Mah Ung — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:00:00 -0500

A budget board with enthusiast touches

The four horsemen may be saddling up and Gozer the Gozerian might soon appear, but that doesn’t mean it’s all bad news. With people digging in the couch crevices for dropped coins to build a new system, AMD’s back on the menu again. Don’t believe us?

We recently added up the cost differential of building a Core i7 machine versus a Phenom II rig and the AMD system saved us at least $200. Sure, the Core i7 will whup any Phenom II up and down the block, but $200 gets you a hell of a lot more videocard, hard drive, or power supply. If you’re thinking, “Why not Core 2?” our reasons are simple: legs. We don’t have faith Intel will push out faster and better Core 2 procs, but AMD will support AM2+ for at least 12 months through newer and faster AM3 CPUs.

Budget buyers rejoice! MSI's Phenom II board will get you through the slump.

Thus, we dusted off our benchmarks to look at MSI’s DKA790GX Platinum. The board features integrated graphics with the option for hybrid CrossFire mode. Unfortunately, the add-in card must be equally as weak as the integrated part, so don’t expect miracles. It’s like combining one poke in the eye with a second poke to see if it really hurts that much.

Compared to the Gigabyte MA 790GP-DS4H, the DKA790GX Platinum has a superior SATA port layout. Other enthusiast-like touches MSI included are PCB-mounted switches and a fully heat-piped south bridge. We also favor MSI’s excellent Live Update feature that checks for newer BIOSes, utilities, and drivers for the board.

Performance is good, but both the MSI and the Gigabyte 790GX board are aced by Asus’s 790FX-based M3A32-MVP board. As with a lot of modern motherboards, however, performance really isn’t the make-or-break issue. It’s about features and amenities. In this respect, MSI’s board is better than Gigabyte’s. The integrated graphics are a joke, but the 790GX boards tend to sell for $50 less than 790FX boards, with the graphics thrown in for free.

Intel DX58SO

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:08:35 -0500

Core i7 performance with the reliability of an Intel motherboard

Newsflash: Intel still doesn't know how to place SATA ports.

Rifling through the box that the Intel DX58SO “Smackover” board came in, we were surprised not to find “love” and “hate” brass knuckles, because the motherboard definitely conjures feelings of both extremes.

If you think we’re being disrespectful, just take one look at the board’s SATA ports. That will tell you that somebody at Intel still doesn’t know that today’s graphics cards are big, huge, honking affairs. Since Intel oriented all the SATA ports vertically, you’ll have a hell of a time accessing the ports with a dual-slot GPU parked overhead.

And if that doesn’t make you bust out the hate knuckles, the memory slots might. We’ve seen four previous boards for the Core i7—two from Asus, one from DFI, and an MSI mobo—and all have had six DIMM slots so you could run up to 12GB of RAM and maintain tri-channel mode. Not Intel’s.

Intel opted to put four DIMM slots on the board. Just how the hell do you run tri-channel mode with four sticks of RAM? You can’t. The fourth slot shares bandwidth with one of the other DIMMs. As you can imagine, this will impact your performance. Intel even recommends that you use only three slots. If you absolutely must have additional capacity, the company says, you can fill the fourth slot, but at a cost to memory bandwidth.

Also odd is Intel’s decision to support CrossFireX but not SLI for months on end. It was only as we were finishing this review that Intel decided to add SLI in a future BIOS. A little late in the game, but better than a slap in the face.

You’re probably wondering where the love is because it’s all been hate thus far. Unlike most other Intel chipset rollouts, the X58 has been less than smooth. Every other X58 board we’ve tested has gone through multiple BIOS revisions to get things right. The DX58SO, however, has been utterly trouble-free. No weird USB issues, no problems with Turbo Mode. Hell, the DX58SO is even a pretty decent overclocker. We used the DX58SO to push a Core i7 920 to 3.8GHz and it was rock solid. As boring as it is, the board never gave us a hiccup.

Would we build an uber-bling-bling machine around this board? No. Would we build a machine that our significant other or parents would use? You betcha.

DFI LAN Party UT X58

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:39:52 -0500

There's a party on this motherboard and you're invited!

Motherboards can’t just sit quietly in your case and service your parts anymore. Today, motherboards also must advertise to the entire world that you have one badass system. Hoping to outdo all others, DFI’s LAN Party UT X58 Core i7 motherboard features a massive heat pipe appendage, called the “Flame Chiller,” that juts out the back of your case.

The idea is to transport heat from the heatsinks attached to the board’s power regulators and chipset to outside the case, where it can be cooled by the exhaust from the case. Does it work? The concept makes sense, but we’re a bit skeptical of the small contact patch the heat pipe makes with the board. The external heatsink never got hot in our tests, but we typically don’t overclock test boards far enough to overheat voltage regulators. The Flame Chiller looks cool, though!

This board’s not all about flash and panache, however. The board’s tri-SLI implementation is certainly better than on other X58 boards we’ve tested. While other boards’ x16 PCI-E slot arrangements force you to either buy a specific case enclosure or hack-saw off a portion of your videocard to get a tri-SLI configuration up and running, the LAN Party UT X58’s tri-SLI will work in most cases.

With tri-SLI as one possible config, DFI also properly laid out the SATA ports. All eight of the SATA ports on the board are accessible even with three huge GPUs in place. Another two eSATA ports are available on the backplane, too.

DFI’s audio implementation is also pretty interesting. Instead of an audio card riser that stabs into an x1 slot or some custom slot alternative, the riser board (with Realtek codecs on it to lower board electrical noise) connects to the mobo via a ribbon cable. This lets you place the board wherever it’s convenient. Alas, while other enthusiast boards give you X-Fi compatibility through drivers or licensed hardware, the LAN Party UT X58 sticks to basic Realtek codecs and drivers, which aren’t quite as good.

After spending some time overclocking Intel’s threadbare DX58SO board (see page 40), we really appreciate how the LAN Party UT X58 offers far more switches and knobs to turn. One thing DFI needs to add, though, is a status page, so you can tell what your tweaks have changed. For example, you should be able to see what DRAM frequency you have selected instead of calculating it manually.

In our overclocking tests with the LAN Party UT X58, we didn’t get our engineering sample Core i7-965 to the speeds that we did with the DX58SO (just shy of 4GHz), but we spent considerably more time with the Intel board than we can with any review board. Spending more time learning the intricacies of this board’s BIOS could very well improve the overclocking performance.

Unfortunately, DFI’s board doesn’t distinguish itself on the benchmark performance beat, either—it clocks scores that are very similar to all the other X58 boards we’ve tested. DFI does set its Turbo Mode much higher than other boards, but that didn’t seem to impact performance at all.

So what’s the practical upshot? We still prefer the features and onboard X-Fi of the MSI Eclipse SLI that we reviewed in February, but the DFI LAN Party UT X58 comes in a close second.

Asus Rampage II Extreme

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:00:00 -0500

To run Asus’s $400 Rampage II Extreme board you’d have to be either extreme or the world’s biggest poseur. How extreme would you have to be? You’d have to be the type of person who boils liquid helium atop his CPU to keep it cool. And because you can’t waste time overclocking from within the OS, you’d want to reach your hands into the guts of your case and use the board’s PCB-mounted controls that let you check and change voltage, fan speeds, and temps on a tiny one-line LCD external display.

In fact, you’d be so damn hardcore, you wouldn’t even fully trust those voltage readings from the board. Instead, you’d want to hook your Fluke meter directly to the available ports on the board to check the voltage of the CPU, the PCI Express lanes, and the north bridge directly. That’s how badass you’d be.

OK, but what if you’re just a poseur? Don’t worry, you’re set, too. Just fire up the OS applet, set your 3.2GHz Core i7-965 to “i7-crazy-4.0,” and you’re good to go. Now people will think you’re an extreme overclocker when all you did was let the board do the work for you.

Whether you’re a poseur or an extremist, the Rampage II Extreme has everything you need, including six DIMM slots, tri-SLI, and CrossFireX support, as well as licensed Creative audio support that gives you up to EAX4. There are some problems, however. Our biggest issue is that Asus still can’t seem to get Turbo mode to work correctly. You should be able to set Turbo mode based on the thread load on the CPU, but Asus only lets you overclock all cores simultaneously. We also felt overwhelmed by the applets on the board. Between the controls for AI Suite, TurboV, TweakIt, and EPU-6, we couldn’t keep straight what each tool did, and ultimately ignored them all.

As we’ve noted in previous reviews, differences in how motherboard vendors treat their BIOSes and Core i7 overclocking options make it difficult for us to run an exact apples-to-apples comparison among boards. For what it’s worth, though, the Rampage II Extreme fell right into the middle of the pack in our benchmarks. With BIOS updates for i7 boards arriving on a monthly schedule, it’s clear that third-party boardmakers are still trying to get a handle on the brave new world of Core i7.
So, say you’re not that extreme nor do you want to appear to be, well then, we think you’re probably better off with a different, less expensive board.

MSI Eclipse SLI

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:00:15 -0500

An eclipse occurs when one celestial body obscures another. When MSI stuck its X58 motherboard with that moniker, we wondered just what it wanted to hide. Our guess is it’s the fact that the board supports ATI’s CrossFire X. Despite the Eclipse’s support for CrossFire X, MSI chose to change the name of the board at the last minute from simply Eclipse to Eclipse SLI. Regardless, the Eclipse SLI is jam-packed with features that would make any geek weep, including cross-platform GPU support, Core i7, six-slot DDR3, and onboard soft X-Fi audio.

We’ve now tested three X58 boards, and the Eclipse SLI has an edge over its closest competitor, the Asus P6T Deluxe, which we reviewed in January, as well as the stock Intel DX58SO board that we used for most of our Core i7 testing. The Eclipse SLI is technically able to run tri-SLI. We say technically because though you might be able to jam a GTX 280 into the third slot, you’ll probably have to saw off the end of the card to make it fit in your case—the card has to be seated in the bottom slot and hangs over the mobo by about an inch. We tested the Eclipse with a pair of EVGA GTX 280 cards but were unable to test it in tri, as our early board shipped without a bridge. MSI will include bridges with retail boards.

Right now, it’s difficult to compare the performance of the three X58-based boards we’ve tested, as it’s challenging to make sure the boards are all set to the same specs. We attribute most of the performance differences we’ve seen to how each vendor sets up the CPU, not to the performance differences with each board. One thing in the Eclipse’s favor: There’s no need to activate the X-Fi drivers on the board, which is necessary on the Asus boards that feature host-based X-Fi drivers.

So what board would we stick our Core i7 in? It’s hard to say at this point, but if we were forced to choose, the Eclipse SLI would just edge out the Asus P6T Deluxe. But to be honest, with BIOS updates coming out in near real time for the new CPU and new chipset, the answer to that question might be different next month. –gordon mah ung

Asus P6T Deluxe

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:00:00 -0600

Asus’s P6T Deluxe isn’t the most over-the-top Core i7 board we’ve tested, but it certainly has a leg up on Intel’s bare-bones DX58SO. For one thing, it finally brings us graphics reunification by supporting both two-card SLI and CrossFire X configurations.

And instead of the gimpy four-slot DIMM setup of Intel’s DX58SO, the P6T Deluxe features six DDR3 DIMM slots. The board, of course, supports all Core i7 CPUs. Since Intel is the sole chipset provider for X58 and the memory controller is in the CPU itself, most performance differences will be the result of BIOS tweaks each manufacturer implements. We found Asus’s BIOS to be far friendlier than the Intel board’s, which at first glance seems designed for engineers. Truth be told, though, the Asus BIOS can be just as daunting if you tread into the Advanced section.

One thing we did like about the Intel board’s BIOS was the ability to set the individual Turbo mode settings. Asus forces you to adjust the settings with the Asus TurboV utility, but we couldn’t set each core separately. That made it difficult to compare performance between the P6T and the DX58SO, as each board was configured slightly differently. To be frank, performance judgments should be suspended since BIOS updates for both boards are still rolling out twice a month.

As expected, not all was right with the P6T. On occasion, the board would not see our USB drive. Documentation was also substandard, which left us pushing buttons in the numerous applications until we blue-screened the board. Hey, Asus, how about combining all the disparate apps into one utility? Nevertheless, we did manage to bring our 3.2GHz Core i7 up to a fairly stable 3.8GHz on the P6T Deluxe.

There’s a lot to like here, including an improved ExpressGate browser that lets you save files from the preboot browser to a USB key, and a cool Palm display that lets you both overclock the board and remotely monitor its vitals. There are some rough spots still to be ironed out, but we’d definitely take the P6T over Intel’s board at this point.

Gigabyte MA 790GP-DS4H

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:15:07 -0600

Pardon us, but crowing that your integrated graphics chip is better than your competitor’s integrated graphics chip is a bit like bragging that your D is better than your friend’s D-.

As sad as that is, it’s the tack AMD is taking with its 790GX chipset, which Gigabyte’s MA790GP-DS4H mobo is based on. While the chipset features DirectX 10 support and indeed might be faster than other integrated graphics solutions, it’s still slower than the ancient GeForce 7600 GS we compared it to.

The 790GX does support a hybrid mode, which allows you to pair an equally weak Radeon HD 3400-class GPU with the board. By adding the subpar performance of the Radeon to the integrated graphics, you immediately realize you should have purchased a better videocard. If that were the only story, we’d already be done with the 790GX. What’s interesting is that AMD’s latest chipset scales from dirt-poor integrated, to illogical hybrid support, all the way up to full CrossFire support. The MA790GP-DS4H takes full advantage of the CrossFire slots and lets you run two GPUs at full x16 PCI-E 2.0 data rates. However, Gigabyte makes a faux pas by pointing the SATA ports straight up. If you were to run two double-wide GPUs in the board, several SATA ports would be cut off.

The real news concerning the Gigabyte board is the inclusion of AMD’s new SB750 south-bridge chip, which adds RAID 5, additional SATA ports, and the ability to directly overclock the CPU further than you could before, theoretically. Our Phenom overclocks have been good but not stellar, and we didn’t seem to get much further with the new SB750, so your mileage may vary.

In our benchmarks, the board’s performance was all over the map, with hard drive scores particularly low. Only after installing a patch provided to the media (with the warning that it could result in data loss) did we see performance actually match that of boards based on the 790FX chipset. We imagine that final drivers will include the patch, but it’s obvious to us that the MA 790GP-DS4H’s drivers weren’t fully baked for the release, so color us unimpressed.