Recommended Award
GIGABYTE X58A-UD9
VS.
RRP: GIGABYTE X58A-UD9: $699
Website: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3434#ov
Test Machine
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AMD Radeon HD5870
(Catalyst 10.2)
Corsair GTX2 2250
WD VelociRaptor 600GB
Antec 1200 OC
Windows 7 32-Bit
I
t is well known in the
motherboard world that ASUS
and Gigabyte are bitter rivals;
in fact it would be fair to say
they strongly dislike each other.
That is the reason why it is very
important for both companies
28 The OverClocker October 2010
to have a flagship motherboard
that stands head and shoulders
above the other, as a statement
to their superiority. So our
excitement could not be contained
when we decided to pit the best
motherboards from Gigabyte and
ASUS in the X58A-UD9 (UD9) and
the Rampage III Extreme (R3E).
Analysis
Overall we saw well balanced
results all-round with each
board pulling ahead of the other
in specific areas. In our reviews
we normally do SuperPi 8M but
thought it was more appropriate
given that these are premium
boards to do a full 32M run to
better investigate the differences.
Looking at the UD9 result we saw
a time of 9m 19.246 while the R3E
finished with 9m 23.021. This was
indeed a surprising result, as for
a long time ASUS had been the
leader in SuperPI but the UD9
seems to have finally reversed this
result in Gigabytes favour.
Moving onto 3DMark06 we saw
the Gigabyte entry pull ahead by
a couple of hundred points and
not surprising as this is a direct