Performance Tests

We are going to compare the performance of the junior model in Gigabyte’s family - Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R – against one of the least expensive solutions on Intel X58 Express – Asus P6T. At first we will compare the performance of two testbed configurations in nominal mode. The only changes made to the mainboards’ BIOS settings were connected with enabling Intel processor power-saving technologies. The mainboards configured all other parameters on their own.

We have already come across the situation when Gigabyte mainboards fall dramatically behind their competitors in synthetic memory benchmarks. I don’t know how to explain it, but I have stopped worrying about it long time ago, because in all other test applications Gigabyte mainboards are just as fast or even faster than their opponents. This time, the mainboards performed about the same in all tests except the memory benchmarks, as usual.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that we included Resident Evil 5 Benchmark into our gaming tests. We added this game for its rare ability to use processor resources extremely effectively. By default, the number of threads a game can use equals “n-1”, where “n” is the maximum number of computational threads in the system. Of course, if you have a single-core CPU, the game will share the core computational capacity with the OS, and in case of a dual-core processor will have only one thread at its complete disposal. In our case, the calculations were performed using seven threads and the achieved average test speed was only a little over 100 fps. Remember this number, we will need it later on.

Now let’s see how the two solutions will perform during system overclocking. Gigabyte mainboards used to be known for yielding to their competitors during overclocking even if their performance was the same in nominal mode. These sad times are long gone, this time the boards perform almost equally fast and we don’t see Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R fall behind even in memory benchmarks.

I would like to draw your attention to the Resident Evil 5 benchmark test once again. It is no secret that Intel Hyper Threading technology known from the days of Pentium 4 processors is not always good for performance. This technology allows to double the number of computational threads, which significantly speeds up the applications that can be well paralleled. However, disabling Hyper-Threading in games often allows to increase the performance even at the same CPU frequency, no matter how paradoxical it may seem. And if we take into account that this technology contributes a lot to processor power consumption and heat dissipation, disabling it usually allows us to overclock the processor even more and therefore increase the performance even greater.

Resident Evil 5 belongs to the new generation of games that can efficiently use the potential of multi-core processors, including those supporting Intel Hyper-Threading technology. After we overclocked our system the performance increased beyond 150 fps, which is more than 1.5 times (over 50%) higher than in the nominal mode. We have never seen such an impressive performance boost without any graphics card overclocking involved. This game should be available on PC platform in the fall, so I don’t know yet how good it is, but we definitely need games like that and have been waiting for them for a long time.