Testing Procedures
We will be running the Gigabyte X58A-UD5 through a full battery of benchmarks. Once again here are the specifications of our entire testing system.
Intel Core i7 965 Extreme
Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1GB Video Card
OCZ 6GB DDR3 Memory
Kingwin Lazer Gold 1000W Power Supply
Cooler Master V6 GT CPU Cooler
BitFenix Colossus Full Tower Case
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Here is a shot of CPU-Z.
We will be separating the tests into 4 different categories: CPU & System Testing, Video Testing, Gaming Testing, and USB 3.0 testing. Here are the following benchmarks and programs we will be using for each category.
CPU & System
SiSoftware’s Sandra (download)
– Processor Arithmetic
– Processor Multimedia
– Memory Bandwidth
– Cache & Memory
– Physical Disks
Super Pi (download)
PCMark Vantage (download)
Video
3DMark Vantage (download)
Cinebench 11.5 (download)
Heaven Demo 2.1 (download)
Stone Giant Demo (download)
Gaming
Resident Evil 5 (Buy)
Alien vs. Predator (Buy)
Crysis Warehead (Buy)
DiRT 2 (Buy)
Overclocking
This is the first motherboard I’ve reviewed in 2 years so my overclocking skills are a little lacking. Overclocking this system was more or less a learning experience for me. I actually spent about a week trying to get this system for 4.0Ghz to find out the memory in the system was what was holding me back. The memory in this system when overclocked just is not stable at all. So we used the default 133 BCLK frequency and used a 29x clock ratio to achieve the overclock of 3.86Ghz compared to the stock 3.20Ghz. This is only a 660Mhz overclock, I’m sure I could have done a little better, but like I said I am new to this.
