Overclocking is a big deal these days. I can remember when it was just a bunch of crazed guys with too much money and free time on their hands. We used to do things like solder new resistors onto CPUs (the Slot A Athlons), swap out caps and resistors on motherboards to get more voltage through the boards and to the CPU. I vividly remember building water cooling kits with pool pumps and tubing bought from Home Depot. Once I even pulled a radiator from a Coke vending machine (old and broken) for a rig I was building. Well thankfully those days are over (but it would still be fun to do some of this). Motherboard makers are now designing and building motherboards with top of the line components voltage regulation systems and tracing that is laid out for business. Many have world class overclockers that work for them to get the most performance out of each and every motherboard. Every now and then they get to build something special from the ground up. We are taking a look at one of these boards that has been built for speed. The one we have in-house was designed by HiCookie; the resident overclocker at Gigabyte. This is the X58A-OC (the OC is for Overclocking as if you could not guess).
Performance testing overview -Our testing is a little different than most. We combine both synthetic and real-world applications to simulate the types of performance common to the individual products. For motherboards this means that we run roughly six synthetic tests and two real-world. We will be expanding the real-world testing in the near future. But there is more to performance than just the raw numbers. As there are multiple components and sub-components on a motherboard there each item can have a distinct impact on the way the product will perform once you get it in your system. It is important to note not only the actual results but what they mean to you as a potential consumer. We will try to give this information to you. But we do not just cover the performance aspects that are measurable. We also talk about the components that might not have a direct benchmark. These are items like Audio Quality, ease of use and installation. Section 1 Subsystems -Memory -Memory performance is very important on a motherboard, especially when you have a CPU with multiple cores and threads. If you have slow memory your cores and threads can become starved for data to execute. To test memory performance we run both Sisoft’s SANDRA and AIDA64. These two combine to not only give us accurate numbers but to validate each other. For testing at stock speeds the memory is hard set to 1333MHz while overclocking testing is done at the highest stable speed for the voltage of 1.65v this is due to the different memory dividers for each CPU. As such, the memory speeds will vary greatly. This means that the overclocked numbers are a little misleading and while they can show a trend are really only included to show if a board has a problem with memory performance at high clockspeeds.
This is an interesting chart here. It reminds me of the days when Gigabyte was far too conservative with their memory timings and skews. The result was the default skews were too loose and they resulted in lower than normal memory speeds. That is sort of what we are seeing here. With the X58A-OC there is the possibility that these speeds represent an error in coding the stock performance metrics. Thankfully this is an issue that can be corrected with future updates.
Looking at the overclocked speeds we find some additional evidence to support our theory that the BIOS needs some tweaking to correct a slight memory performance issue. You can see that the UD9 is way up in the chart but then again the UD9 has a clean and tweaked BIOS; we are certain the X58A-OC will get there too.
Our AIDA64 results give us a closer look at the issue. Take a look at the Latency between the two; the stock numbers show 57.2ns that is a lifetime when you are talking about a system with an IMC. The overclocked numbers drop down to 48.1ns almost 10ns difference. Drive performance -Drive performance is also one of the major subsystems that goes to make up the performance of a motherboard. For our testing we use Sandra and AIDA64 again. We only test with single drives for each type of controller present on the motherboard (unless it is a professional product where we will use RIAD 5 and/or 10). We have also begun using a Seagate PS-110 USB 3 external HDD for our USB 3.0 performance. As a side note, we include the overclocked numbers here to make sure (again) that you are not going to see a major drop in performance due to minor instabilities at high clock speeds.
Remember that little note about not being able to use AHCI? Well… here is the result of that. We find a serious performance gap between the X58A-OC and the next board in the group. This can hurt us later in some of our HDD dependent tests.
AIDA64 gives us the details for what SANDRA summarizes. Under the IDE Legacy mode the system gets great read speeds at the beginning of the drive but anything toward the middle and the end of the drive drops off significantly. This would seem to be a potential issue with the way the legacy IDE mode deals with the trim firmware in the SSD. Again, this is something that can be corrected with a BIOS update.
Power -Power efficiency is another of those misnomers that we get caught up in. We hear about idle states and power gates. But what does that mean to you and I? On the surface having power management that reduces idle power sounds great and can be a benefit to someone that leaves their system on for long periods of time (and inactive) but how a system handles power under load and the delta between the two states is often more important than the idle power usage numbers. We use only P3 Kill A Watt instruments for measuring power.
Under our stock usage the Gigabyte X58A-OC looks like it is about average for power draw. At least it looks average until you realize that I had all of the available power connectors connected. When you take all of that into consideration the stock power draw numbers are a little more impressive.
The overclocked numbers are even more impressive when you think about what we have going into the board (remember the 1200Watt max to the CPU?).Cooling (Board Level) -Board level cooling is an important factor in product performance and longevity. Components like the chipset, VRM modules and even capacitors need to be kept relatively cool to prevent failure. As these parts are made of silicon, they have a thermal breakdown threshold; or melting point. At that temperature the actual transistors built into chip will begin to deform and break down. Granted, the threshold is often very high, but you still need to make sure that components stay away from this level of heat for longer product life.
Remember how we told you about the design of the board level cooling? Well, the proof is in the pudding. We see great stock numbers (granted only .4 degrees cooler). This is not just the size of the cooling surface but the way it is designed. The overclocked scores are also very good, they are not at the very top, but they are still good.
Audio -Audio is highly subjective. What we find pleasing may sound “off” to you. That is always going to the problem with testing audio; results will vary too widely depending on the tastes of the listener. However, there are ways of measuring the audio output with an objective ear. There is also the issue of audio causing performance issues in gaming and video playback. The reason this is a potential source of concern is that all onboard audio CODECs (Compression/Decompression) are CPU controlled. This means that while the audio chip controls the audio levels and effects of the audio the actual work is done on the CPU. Usually this will not be a problem with today’s powerful CPUs. Even the lower and consumer level products can handle high-end audio these days. But again there is the chance that a bad design or software will hinder your system and performance. On the other side the limits of board space, cost, etc will also prevent the level of audio quality you can get from an add-in board. We test all audio parts with three media types, Movie (DVD), MP3 Music, and Gaming. These are pushed to our Tec On model 55 Tube Amp to see if we can detect any signal issues in the reproduction. The audio on the X58A-OC is rudimentary, it is there because Futuremark’s 3DMark 11 and PCMark Vantage actually require it. If this was not true, I have a feeling that it would not even be here. Still even with its ancillary status the audio is not bad. If you are looking at this board for normal use it will suffice, but you might want to get a better audio card if you are looking for gaming or anything else.Networking -This one is something that is a requirement anymore. If you have a computer, the chances are good (like 99%) that you are also connected to high-speed internet. With this you need a good and solid LAN chip to make sure that your data flows properly out and back. The network chip on the X58A-OC is also something of an ancillary product. It is needed for more than one reason; you need it to submit scores and there are also some benchmarks and tests that look for the network card. If this was not the case or you could submit scores to Futuremark in other ways I am fairly certain that even this would have been left off. On the other side this, like the audio is more than acceptable for 99% of users in the market the X58A-OC is being sold to.
