X-bit labs

Do We Really Need Intel X48 Express? - Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 Mainboard Review (page 7)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 04/15/2008 | 05:58 AM ]

Benchmark Results

We compared the performance of Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 mainboard on the new Intel X48 chipset against that of widely spread platforms on Intel X38. Since GA-X48T-DQ6 supports DDR3 SDRAM, we selected ASUS P5E3 Deluxe to be its main competitor in this test session.

Testbeds were configured as follows:

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 ((LGA775, 3.16GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 6MB L2, Wolfdale).
• Mainboards:
  • ASUS P5E3 Deluxe (LGA775, Intel X38, DDR3 SDRAM);
  • Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 (LGA775, Intel X48, DDR3 SDRAM).
• Graphics card: OCZ GeForce 8800GTX (PCI-E x16).
• HDD: Western Digital WD1500AHFD (SATA150).
• OS: Microsoft Windows Vista x86.

Performance in Nominal Mode

The first series of tests were performed with the processor working at its default speed of 3.16GHz set as 9.5 x 333MHz. The memory frequency in this case was set at 1333MHz with 7-7-7-20 timings.

As usual, we will first check out synthetic benchmarks testing the memory subsystem performance. This parameter is crucial for the performance of mainboards for Intel processors. For our tests we used Lavalys Everest 4.50 utility.

Although we made sure that primary timings, Command Rate and Performance Level were the same on both test platforms, ASUS and Gigabyte mainboards configured secondary timings differently, which led to different results of the memory subsystem tests. Nevertheless, even now we can already state that Intel X48 cannot ensure higher performance than Intel X38. The memory controller in Intel’s “third series” chipsets is so well optimized that there is simply no room left for further improvement. That is why we can only expect Intel based platforms to demonstrate any performance growth when they launch new Nehalem processors with principally new memory controller built into the CPU core.

However, before we make any final conclusions, let’s check out the situation in complex benchmarks and real applications.

The results indicate that in most cases Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 outperforms ASUS P5E3 Deluxe. However, don’t get too excited just yet. The thing is that it is not the superiority of the new Intel X48 chipset over Intel X38, but the fact that Gigabyte mainboard doesn’t set the nominal FSB frequency quite fairly using 335MHz instead of 333MHz.