Motherboard
Myth Busting
ASUS CROSSHAIR V FORMULA VS GIGABYTE
990FXA-UD5 - THE EFFICIENCY SHOWDOWN
ERP: Gigabyte GA- 990FXA UD - $180 | ASUS Crosshair V Formula -$220
Website: http://www.gigabyte.com | http://www.asus.com/
Test Machine
• AMD FX 8150 and 1090T CPU
• 4GB Corsair Dominator 12800C8
• Asus GTX480 (WHQL 285.62
drivers)
• Western Digital 1Tb Green Caviar
HDD
• Corsair AX1200 PSU
• Windows 7 64Bit Pro SP1 fully
patched
the official press kits containing
the CH V board. We ran some
benchmarks that would hopefully
demonstrate this claimed
difference. We performed these at
the Stock speeds of our AMD CPUs
on a new install of Windows 7 Pro.
The main stress points were CPU,
RAM and GPU efficiency.
ANALYSIS
T
his is not the typical review you
might find in more common
websites or magazines. The
intention here was to see how
efficient the Asus board really
is in comparison with Gigabyte's
cheaper offering, the UD5 and if
there’s some truth to the claimed
poor performance of the Crosshair
V Formula. The 990FXA-UD5 was
one of the boards that had been
used by some websites; showing
completely different results
compared to most reviews using
18 The OverClocker Issue 18 | 2012
LOOK AT THE TABLES BEFORE
YOU READ THIS!
Time to get cracking, starting with
the AMD FX-8150 CPU results.
As the Crosshair V Formula
was designed with the Zambezi
architecture in mind one would
expect it to perform well yes?
Well, as you can see there's not
much between the boards. It's so
close that we consider the results
to fall within the margin of error.
Did I test correctly you may ask?
Yes of course as these results
you see here represent the 3rd
run on the FX CPU and even more
on the Crosshair V with several
bios updates. The outcome was
the same, both boards put out
similar numbers with the FX 8150
CPU. It makes me wonder how
some publications managed such
compelling numbers for their
FX-8150 reviews. I am perplexed
by the numbers which showed
the FX-8150 thrashing the 2700K
CPU comprehensively. Looking
a little bit deeper into some of
the other reviews on these very
same websites, I saw testing
methods, software and games
being altered between each review
making it pretty hard to compare
hardware reliably. Add to which
the award rating was so biased
awarding “Must buy”, Gold awards
and similarly overrated praises.
Conclusion: Thank god for the end
user reviews and testing.
I also tested both boards with a
Phenom II X6 1090T CPU and again