Intel X58 Motherboard Roundup - What does $300 Get You?
by Gary Key on December 5, 2008 3:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Final Words
All of our motherboards performed admirably today, some better than others, but in the end any motherboard sporting an X58 will perform the same when it comes to standard performance attributes. Which board is better really comes down to your needs, budget, and for some, product brand loyalty. We are willing to recommend any of our boards at this point in time.
The BIOS releases we utilized are stable now, offer excellent performance, and have addressed the majority of our usability problems. That said, each manufacturer still has tuning work left to accomplish for improved memory and overclocking performance. We might even see some minor improvements in power consumption shortly although our numbers reflect an almost best case scenario right now.
We still have several boards to review, ranging from the $220 MSI Platinum up to the $400 Foxconn Bloodrage with several in-between. Our next review will focus on the "lower" end X58 boards from Intel, Gigabyte, Biostar, and MSI. Our final review will feature the upper end boards from ASUS, Gigabyte, DFI, and Foxconn. In between, we will provide a comprehensive OC guide along with a detailed look at memory performance with several DDR3 tri-channel kits from Corsair, OCZ, Patriot, GSkill, Kingston, Crucial, and Mushkin. Look for these in the coming weeks after we return from our final IGP roundup.
So, let's just dive straight into our board recap. Additional details about each motherboard can be located in the features section.
Awards
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We are proud to present the ASUS P6T-Deluxe with our Gold Editors Award. We highly recommend this board for beginners and advanced users alike. The Deluxe is not perfect, no board is, but it was by far the easiest board to use on a daily basis. Regardless of whether we wanted to setup a stable 24/7 folding machine or push the board to its limits trying to reach a new overclock record in the labs, it was a simple process to do either. We especially liked the ASUS BIOS as it is very informative, lists out the min/max and standard settings for the major BIOS options, and makes it possible for new users to quickly get the most out of the board. Yet, it still retains enough options to satisfy most tweakers and always recovered from settings that made us look for the clear CMOS button on the other boards.
When it comes to performance, the word balanced was the first thought in our minds. The P6T Deluxe offers the best video performance of the boards we tested while providing class leading performance in the majority of our application benchmarks. The board also features an array of options including Serial Attached SCSI controller support, SLI and CrossFire, very good on-board audio capabilities, eSATA and Firewire, and enough USB ports to make one forget about needing a hub. Based on the layout, this is the board we would recommend for 2x SLI or CrossFire users, plus you get the bonus of class leading video performance.
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We are excited to present our Silver Editors award to Gigabyte for the GA-EX58-UD5. What else can we say, this board is a tweaker's delight and has tremendous performance potential. Based on the progress that Gigabyte has made with the latest F4K BIOS, we feel like this board could ultimately offer the best overclocking experience in the mid-range X58 market. The performance of this board was consistently near the top and ultimately offered the best overall memory performance. While performance is important, ultimately a board needs to offer the right feature set, stability, support, and pricing in a very competitive market.
The GA-EX58-UD5 offers all of this and more to potential X58 buyers. The UD5 offers an abundance of SATA ports, flexible layout, an excellent cooling solution, very good HD audio featuring Dolby Digital Live encoding, and an extensive accessory package along with excellent documentation.
We almost placed this board ahead of the ASUS P6T-Deluxe. There were just a few items that we felt like Gigabyte could improve upon to reach the next level. We wish Gigabyte could match the usability and informational features of the ASUS BIOS, the x16 slots are spaced too close to each other for our liking when using a 2x CrossFire or SLI setup since heat generation could be a problem in cases without proper ventilation, and losing the first DIMM slot when utilizing large CPU heatsink/fan designs means 12GB users are out in the cold. Regardless, the GA-EX58-UD5 is still an excellent board and one we highly recommend.
The Others
The MSI Eclipse X58 is the most expensive board in the roundup at $322 with rebate and offers an extensive set of features and accessories. We loved the layout, color scheme, and overall quality of the board. We like to think of the MSI Eclipse as a Grand Touring Coupe in the automotive world, it offers an excellent blend of features and performance. The board performed equally to the other offerings with a 3GB or 6GB memory load but buckled underneath the pressure when overclocking with 12GB. Based on the progress MSI has made in the past couple of weeks, we expect this problem to be solved shortly.
We are not crazy about the BIOS layout as several of the voltage settings in the BIOS are rather cryptic since MSI utilizes a +/- setting for changes. The base voltage information is not always listed so the user has to have prior knowledge of base settings before making an informed decision when overclocking. MSI tries to make up for this with auto settings that almost allow the user to overclock exclusively by just setting the Bclk rate and letting the board do the rest. However, while this system worked well, it sometimes drove voltages past the rate we could effectively utilize with air cooling.
In the end, we still recommend the MSI Eclipse X58 for users who want a feature rich, stable, and well supported platform but do not plan on tweaking or heavily overclocking the system. This could all change with another BIOS update and we will be the first to let you know if it does.
The EVGA X58 SLI is an excellent motherboard and one that we have throughly enjoyed working with the past few weeks. EVGA's support has been phenomenal and we expect that to continue to end users. This board has award worthy status written all over it, just one snag, memory multipliers. Unlike the other boards in our roundup and in the labs, the EVGA board tops out at a 10x memory multiplier (DDR3-1333) for the i965. Even though 10x is available, the i920/i940 are regulated to the 6x (800) or 8x (1066) multipliers. While we can live with these multipliers when raising Bclk to the 200+ level, we just find it a hindrance that the other multipliers are not available in a board designed for the more extreme users.
Otherwise, the quality of components, layout, and BIOS design are very good. Performance is also very good and in off-line testing it comes extremely close to the Gigabyte board up high. We have seen continual performance improvements and expect this board to do very well in the overclocking market once the memory multiplier problem is solved. If overclocking is not of primary importance, for a lot of us it is not, then the ease of use, stability, support, and features of this board make it a highly desirable product in the $300 range. At the end of the day, this board simply performs well and never makes a fuss about doing it.
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mvrx - Wednesday, December 10, 2008 - link
I know these motherboards are months away, but please include dual socket i7 reviews as soon as they become available for testing. My next system will be a dual i7 quad for sure and I'm anxiously awaiting these MB's to come out and mature.I didn't go with current dual socket architectures because of FB-DIMMs limiting the performance and costing so much more. Really hoping to see a resurgance of the dual+ socket enthusiast systems.
And if anyone replies "What can you be using that even takes up a single socket quad core" - well.. then you probably don't know enough about enthusiast computing to reply here. ;-)
strikeback03 - Wednesday, December 10, 2008 - link
I'd think that last line shows why we are unlikely to see a resurgence of multi-socket enthusiast systems. There are very few that have applications which would take advantage of more than 4 physical cores/8 logical cores.mvrx - Thursday, December 11, 2008 - link
Well, I approach it with this logic..... and I get this alot from people.. "few applications that take advantage of more than 4 cores". I'm not running one or two applications....
MS OneCare (or your chosen security suite), seems to zap 15%-20% of overall system performance depending on what it's doing.
Even my old LOTR BFME2 ROTWK game spans 4 cores.. Not very well, but it does.
I run a skype conference server for gamers (an upcoming competitor to Ventrilo) with 20 or so callers on the line at once. Skype (especially skype 4.0) spans many cores reasonably well. (s4pg.us - website's not up yet)
I like to leave my email, web browsers, etc - open when I play my games.. and unfortunately I probably have another 10 active programs sitting in the background in some way. According to resource manager I have about 1100 active threads running, I think the average enthusiast only would have 500-700.
Now, I may be the upper-end of the catagory of heavy resource users, but thats mostly because people don't have the horsepower to do more so they don't. Chicken and Egg issue. If I can get a i7 for $300, and maybe the dual socket MB costs me a $150 premium, I'm sure as heck going to go dual socket.
I know one of my biggest issues is HD performance, but I hope to fix that with one of Micron Tech's new PCIe SSD cards... At that point, I'll probably be easily slamming two i7's. And I do like to run x264 mp4 compression jobs overnight. Even if it only liked using 4 cores, I can run several instances at once.
According to the roadmaps, the X58 is dual socket ready.. So I doubt it will be long until we see at least a few boards.
anindrew - Wednesday, December 10, 2008 - link
I had already ordered and received most of my parts for my new X58/i7 920 based system before this article went up. I was anxiously waiting for it to see what Anand and crew thought. Like so many commented here, I had no idea Anandtech's crew helped sort out issues with motherboards and BIOSes. I think it would be interesting to hear more about that and specifically why you did that (by choice or to help everyone).I built my system yesterday using the Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5, i7 920, and 6GB of G.Skill DDR3-1600 8-8-8-21 memory (those are the actual specs of it). I have had no problems at all setting the system up. Everything works as it should. I have not tried to overclock yet, but I will since I have the Noctua SE1366.
The Asus P6T does look great, and I am happy to hear that it worked as it should right away. I had to debate between the Asus and Gigabyte boards. In the end, I chose the Gigabyte because I got a $30 discount in a combo with the Geforce GTX260 core 216. Time will tell if I made the right choice. :-)
chuckbam - Tuesday, December 9, 2008 - link
I member of ABXZone.com pointed out to me that the ASUS P6T Deluxe has a memory range conflict on the device I/O APIC controller. Does anyone have more information on this?http://chuckbam.com/Posts/IOAPIC.PNG">http://chuckbam.com/Posts/IOAPIC.PNG
chrhon - Tuesday, December 9, 2008 - link
Thank you for bringing up those comments at the begging of the article. Pretty much everyone I talk to is fed up with motherboard problems and even considering something such as buying from Dell. These mobo manufacturers are shooting themselves in the foot. Sadly the reviews seem to help them.My last build I started with a Gigabyte board and it was good to me but there were complaints on all the reviews on the memory overclocking. Then that board stopped working for me and I bought a DFI board that was universally praised by the reviews and it was the biggest pain in the ass - almost every time I would add or remove a card or flash the BIOS I would go through non-POST hell. I don't see myself EVER buying a DFI board again based on that experience.
If a motherboard company comes out bragging about its quality components and stability THAT is where I am going to put my money. Believe it or not its things like chipset fans being cheap and going out that make more difference in long term satisfaction of a board than one more (when there are already 50) way to tweak some voltages.
Kroneborge - Tuesday, December 9, 2008 - link
Reliability is definitely key. Fast doesn’t matter if your computer won’t run. I do music production, along with my games, and I want a system that is going to run all the time with no problems. If that means I can’t overclock, then I would rather do that. I definitely suggest adding a reliability chart so those of us who need computers for production purposes can factor that in.Also for music production having 12gb or even 24 is perfectly reasonable for large sample libraries. Manufacturers that think supporting those sizes (as advertised) isn’t a priority are wrong.
Thanks for the great review, and please continue to put an emphasis on things working. And keep updating stuff so we know where they stand. I for one won’t be purchasing my new computer till I’m sure I can get it working with little fuss right out of the box.
SiliconDoc - Tuesday, December 9, 2008 - link
That was very kind of you Anand - to point out how the monster that was created is out of control...rofl - I couldn't help thinking - imagining - it's just like the bankers/loan officers/fannie n freddie freaks that fried the economy with wild eyed speculation and housing bubbling... just crazed wackos doing "what must be done" in the name of ... well profits or chest thumping or bonuses or bragging rights or all the above in all cases...
Now the crash and burn of simple motherboard features not even working is splaying out in the public - I've seen the posted reports by the end users...
"We don't have to do it right - or even ethically *advertised features actually work* - seems to be the call of the day everywhere.
So anyway - good job actually EXPERIENCING THE LAST STRAW AND TRYING TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT .
Hopefully the pendulum will swing back toward center without anyone getting fragged... (although I'm sure purchasers in some cases wish otherwise).
SiliconDoc - Tuesday, December 9, 2008 - link
PS - Yes, so that I'm not missing something either - it DOES sound like they owe Anand and the staff about a million bucks (each).I can see how a good review here and there has now ballooned into "lab support" ....
A million bucks each ought to do - the manufacturers can take up an R&D collective - if they threaten to cut off boards just do a maniacal laugh - they will crumble and pay up.
;-)
araczynski - Monday, December 8, 2008 - link
mildly interesting, but personally i'd like to see this in comparison to something from the 'normal' lineup, you know, like what most people currently have.throw a C2D/3ghz/4gb in there and then we have something interesting.
compare apples to apples, not just apples to themselves.