ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte & MSI: Four Flagship X58 Motherboards Reviewed
by Rajinder Gill on July 15, 2010 10:00 PM ESTFar Cry 2
Featuring fantastic visuals courtesy of the Dunia Engine, this game also features one of the most impressive benchmark tools we have seen in a PC game. For single GPU results we set the performance feature set to Very High, graphics to High, and enable DX10 with 2xAA. Multi card results are generated using Ultra High settings with 4XAA.
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II
We are big fans of the Warhammer franchise, especially Dawn of War II. One of the latest RTS games in our library is also one of the more demanding titles on both the CPU and GPU. We crank all options to Ultra, enable AA, and then run the built-in performance benchmark for our result.
Futuremark 3D Mark Vantage
We utilize the performance preset of Futuremark's 3D Mark Vanatge to compare 3-way SLI performance .
ASUS's R3E scores high consistently in all benchmarking tests thus far. The MSI turns in decent scores but comes in below the NF200 supporting boards when loaded with three GPUs. We're not sure on the exact cause though will conject that it's possibly down to PCIe bandwidth. Either way, the loss is not significant enough to warrant alarm at this point. The Gigabyte and EVGA boards are hampered slightly by the latency penalty of the NF200, and give up 3~5% of performance to the ASUS R3E under normal operating conditions.
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fausto412 - Thursday, July 15, 2010 - link
i don't think i've even see a $700 dollar motherboard. For that kind of money it better come with a hot super model to spend a few nights with the poor sap who spends that much.mrjminer - Thursday, July 15, 2010 - link
Actually, it ensures that you will not get a hot super model to spend a few nights with you.Taft12 - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
I could really use one of these. I can't remember the last time I had a night I didn't have to spend with a hot super model. Won't they please just let me game?!nbjknk - Thursday, November 25, 2010 - link
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Thursday, 21 October 2010 at 9:48 PM
Souka - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
Maybe Gigabyte's marketing dept. gets it advice from Apple?Charge more...people will think it's better... ;)
SunSamurai - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
Gigabyte doesnt have anything to offer that accounts for the extra cost, like OSX.hansmuff - Thursday, July 15, 2010 - link
The AOpen AK89-Max had this way before Gigabyte.What is commendable though is that Gigabyte puts this even on their lower-end boards. Great move.
silverblue - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
Sorry, but the Gigabyte BX2000 has that beat by a good few years.Fuchikoma - Thursday, July 15, 2010 - link
The branding of these motherboards are getting totally ridiculous and quite comical. What really annoys me about high-end mobos is that the manufacturer spends a lot of time making them aesthetically pleasing, which in turn you spend copious amounts of money, and yet their support software are absolutely horrendous - consisting of a bunch of bad GUI hacks.Powerlurker - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
As far as I can tell, most of these ultra-high-end consumer motherboards are targeted more at competitive benchmarkers than people who actually want to use their computers to do stuff.