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GIGABYTE X58A-UD7 Motherboard Review

The X58A-UD7 is GIGABYTE\'s newest entry into the fiercely competitive LGA1366 board arena. The board packs a lot of promise, built on GIGABYTE\'s tried and true X58 based design with some nice bells and whistles added for that extra bit of appeal including USB 3.0 and SATA III features.

Subsystem Testing

NOTE: For all Subsystem Testing, an Intel LGA 1366 Core i7 920 CPU with the board base clock running at 133MHz and 3 x 2GB Kingston HyperX KHX1600C9D3K6 memory modules running at 1600MHz were used in testing.

Audio - Subjective Listening

One of the easiest ways to determine the quality of the audio subsystem is via a subjective sound test. Ideally, a sound test requires audio covering the entire spectrum, from subtle to intense. For this test, I chose to listen to the Flyleaf album Momento Mori.

Audio playback was without issue, making for a distortion free and enjoyable audio experience.

Audio - Microphone Port Testing

The MIC-IN input was tested using our standard Labtec Desk Mic 524 testing microphone. Spoken words were recorded and played back using Microsoft Sound Recorder, with the Microphone Boost option disabled and enabled. The Microphone Boost option is found within the Advanced menu under the Microphone section within the Volume Control menu.

Pickup was very muted without Microphone Boost enabled. With it enabled, pickup was fine but the audio would cut out at times on playback. However, no distortion was detectable in either case.

Drive Performance

To adequately test the capabilities of the on board USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394 connections, we chose to use an ACOMDATA HD060U2FE-72-USB 2.0/FireWire HDD connected to both ports. SATA and IDE drive tests were performed using a Maxtor 40Gb ATA 133 model 6E040L0 hard drive on the IDE header and Samsung 40GB SATA II hard drives on the SATA headers. The SATA drives were used for testing in a RAID 0 16k block size configuration and in standalone mode on both the Intel ICH10R and GIGABYTE controllers. Note that no testing was done using the SATA 3 headers on the Marvell controller due to the fact that the controller would not recognize the SATA 2 drives when connected. Testing was also conducted using an IDE drive in a standalone configuration on the GIGABYTE controller. All drive benchmarks were done using the open source Iometer program.

Drive performance on the ICH10R controller was hands down better in both standalone and RAID 0 mode then that of the GIGABYTE drives in RAID 0 mode. The ICH10R based RAID 0 array was the fastest, closely followed performance wise by the standalone drive on the same controller. The IDE drive performance came in as expected, along with the external drive performances. In all cases, the CPU utilization remained well below 1%.

Unfortunately, I could not get the Marvell SATA 3 controller to recognize the SATA 2 test drives, so no performance numbers were posted.

(Editor's Note: Some of our SATA II drives are getting a bit old. So some of Morry's compatibility issues are probably well founded. We are waiting to move SATA III drive before buying new ones for testing. Given the bandwidth of SATA III, we will likely be testing most SATA III controllers with 4-disk striped arrays. Moving onto somewhat never drives we had no issues with a three+ year old WD250, or a newer Blu-ray optic drive using the SATA III controllers. )

Network Utilization Tests

Hagel Technologies’ DU Meter software was used in conjunction with Windows Task Manager to measure the performance of the onboard Realtek GigE NICs. In testing, it was found that both Realtek controllers had equivalent performance to one another. DU meter was used to measure bandwidth, with Windows Task Manager to monitor the CPU utilization on the test system. For the test itself, a 750MB archive file containing various sized .WMA audio files for the large file transfer test and a 750MB worth of various sized .WMA audio files for the small files transfer test were used in conjunction with a PCI based Gigabit NIC on the host system and a crossover cable to connect the host system to the test system. A crossover cable was used to rule out any possible bandwidth losses due to hub or switch passage.

Realtek GigE controller

The large file transfer results were impressive to say the least, with the upload speeds besting the download speeds by almost 6 MB/s, coming in at a blazing 44MB/s average transfer speed. During both tests, the measured CPU utilization remained close to 0%.

The small file transfer results mimicked those of the large file results, with the upload average besting that of download by over 12 MB/s as a respectable 38 MB/s. The CPU utilization again remained close to 0%.

Synthetic Performance Testing

Test Systems

The following system configurations were used for the system benchmark graphs, as well as all graphs listed under the Application and Gaming Benchmarks sections:

Graphs are labeled as follows: Motherboard - CPU Type & Clock Speed - Memory Speed

Sisoft Sandra 2009

Note that all results above were obtained running the installed memory in Dual Channel mode for all systems with the exception of the Intel X58 based boards which ran in Triple Channel mode.

The X58A-UD7 performed as expected, easily matching performance with the other X58 based board. This is a good indicator of a well implemented board memory subsystem.

The X58A-UD7 again performs as expected, easily keeping pace with the other X58 based system. Equivalent performance here is good, indicative of a properly functioning board to CPU interface.

Hiper Pi

No surprises here, the X58A-UD7 continues to stick with the other X58 based system.

wPrime

The X58A-UD7 rounds out the synthetic tests on its feet, managing to perform on par with the other X58 board.