X58 review: Asus Sabertooth X58 Review | bit-tech.net

IndexEVGA X58 SLIGigabyte GA-EX58-UD5MSI Eclipse X58ASUS P6T DeluxeTest SetupMemory PerformanceGeneral PerformanceGaming ResultsSATA, USB, Firewire and Ethernet PerformancePower ConsumptionInitial Overclocking ResultsFinal Words

As of November 17th you can officially buy an Intel Core i7 processor — the new heavyweight champion of the world. When it comes to media encoding and 3D animation/rendering tasks, the Core i7 is not only without peer but also provides us the sort of generational performance gap that we’ve come to expect from Intel every two years. By now you’ve already decided whether or not you want to buy one, and if you’re in a rush to spend money, the next question is what motherboard do you pick?

Current Core i7 CPUs work in Intel’s new LGA-1366 socket, currently only found on motherboards based on the X58 chipset. While Intel did a great job of making sure the Core i7 was available at a wide range of price points ($284, $562, and $999), the X58 boards themselves are pretty pricey. We’ve got a consistent group of $300+ motherboards on the market, and honestly we’re not expecting ~$100 Nehalem boards until the introduction of the mainstream Lynnfield/Havendale CPUs in 2H 2009. Boards using the P55 chipset should arrive early next year and at least bring in true sub-$200 options, but for now it’s an X58 world.

These boards are very high end — with the exception of Intel’s own X58, these motherboards all feature six DDR3 DIMM slots, easily enabling 12GB of memory on a desktop platform. Certification for 24GB and 48GB is coming, but that’s absolutely ridiculous on a desktop motherboard. Combine that with the fact that all three Core i7 parts are capable of working on 8 threads at a time and you’ve got the makings of an extremely powerful system. A desktop Core i7 system has the potential to embarrass quite a few upper end workstations already on the market.

What we’ve put together today is a roundup of the «midrange» X58 motherboards currently on the market, a sort of first look at the state of the X58 realm for early adopters who are lucky enough to be buying today. We’ve got motherboards ranging from $220 to $390 in the labs that we will go through over the next couple of weeks; if you’re building a Core i7 system before the end of this year, we’ll help you pick a motherboard in each category.  

BIOS Ridiculousness: Everyone Say, «Thank You Gary»

Hey guys, Anand here. I’m writing this sub-section, not at Gary’s request, but because I felt it was necessary. Over the past year I’ve watched the number of motherboards Gary gets to review go down, and the amount of time spent per motherboard go up tremendously. This year was especially bad as Gary spent more time helping manufacturers fix their BIOSes and compatibility problems than actually writing motherboard reviews.

I wanted to help bring some of what Gary does to light in this section, just so you know the sad state in which many of these motherboards are being brought to market and the work that goes into getting them ready so that we can actually write about it, much less recommend one.

With that said, let’s take a look at a particular sequence of events we encountered with the motherboards in today’s review.  We are not going to name names today as all of the manufacturers are guilty, some worse than others.   The point being is that we feel the lack of quality assurance before a product hits the market has now reached an all time high.

Testing Ridiculousness:

It is true, too true unfortunately, about the amount of time it takes to thoroughly test a motherboard, report problems, and then regression test a possible fix.  I am anal retentive when it comes to this process as others are also.  While the benefits of doing it eventually payoff for manufacturers and users alike, it is a disservice to our readership to delay reviews of new products based on this seemingly never ending cycle of test, report, test, report.

So we are refocusing our efforts in generating quick and to the point reviews in the motherboard section.  The manufacturers are going to receive two rounds of the test and report process before we publish our reviews.  After this, we will provide short updates about the product over its lifespan in the market.  We are also instituting a new process where we will purchase select products at retail and review them as is.   This means no conversations with the manufacturers or access to the designers and engineers that we currently enjoy.  We will utilize the latest drivers, BIOS, and utilities on the website in the same way you do when purchasing a product. 

Our plan is to cycle through each manufacturer so we are not singling out any one supplier but we are going to be brutally honest in our assessments in these particular focus reviews.  Our hope is that it will spur the manufacturers to improve their internal QA processes and focus on product usability at launch instead of setting a world record in SuperPI.

That said, let’s take a quick look at the number of problems we encountered up until this week with our four boards in today’s review.

1.  Of the course of the past 30 days we communicated problems, suggestions, and resolution status on our test products via email 896 times and over a 100 phone conversations.

2.  We have received 31+ different BIOS releases in the last thirty days to address problems and/or improve performance.

3.  Our change log of problems and fixes reads like a bad novel.  While we will not ding the manufacturers for performance improvements that we or others suggest, the simple fact that auxiliary storage controllers, power management features, memory and voltage settings, and other basic features on these boards failed to even work or resulted in a non-POST situation just floored us. 

We are talking about $300 plus motherboards designed and released to be the crown jewel in the manufacturers product lineup.  Of course, there is no excuse for this regardless of price, but one would truly think that the QA process would have noticed simple items like S3 not working, drives attached to certain storage ports not recognized, 12GB memory configurations causing non-POST situations, various BIOS settings not working or auto settings generating out of bounds voltages at stock speeds, power management features that when enabled actually increased power consumption, various overclock bugs, and USB and network controllers operating at half speed.   The list just goes on and on.  To us, these were simple items that we found just booting the board and trying to use it in a manner that 99% of buyers would, not randomly generated bugs due to weird settings, bad drivers, or a collection of old peripherals.

Even more depressing was the fact that several of our technical contacts did not have the necessary components to recreate our problems in a timely manner.  The biggest item was memory, specifically 12GB of memory.  All of the boards had some type of problem with a 12GB installation, ranging from overclock performance to non-POST situations.  Granted, 98% of the 12GB problems have been addressed now, but it took close to a month, dozens of phone calls, hundreds of messages, and constant pressure for this to happen. 

We spoke with several personnel at various companies and they asked why we were so adamant about 12GB compatibility and performance (6GB operation was not much better at first) as one example.  The typical response was not that many people will actually use 12GB and we tuned our board for high overclocks with 3GB, this is what the enthusiast wants.   Our simple answer was and continues to be, «If you advertise the feature, we expect it to work correctly.»  This particular problem highlighted one area that seems to drive the current high-end market. 

Catering or focusing exclusively to the extreme overclocking community has resulted in initial product launches that are focused on getting the highest possible results from a product at the expense of usability, compatibility, and stability.  The quest to release quickly and have the top motherboard in the forums, or HWBot/FutureMark rankings has blinded some of the product teams to the more important issue of ensuring their product actually works as advertised.  We enjoy seeing these records as much as anyone else and I am guilty of scouring the Internet everyday to see what record has been broken and more importantly, how it was done. 

Overclocking is interesting to most of us and its importance in improving the quality of electrical components and design aspects on the motherboards cannot be overstated.   However, we need balance in this area again.  Simply, we need to get the basic features and options working right at product launch and then the BIOS engineers can have free reign in tuning the boards to reach their limits. 

One of the technical marketing personnel at a particular board supplier kept pressing me on how well does the board overclock. They also wanted to know about 3GB memory performance at DDR3-2000+ and my SuperPI scores.  I kept responding with a laundry list of items that needed to be fixed before I would even worry about overclocking.  His responses continued to be, those problems are minor and we will get to them, what we need to know is if our board overclocks and performs better than the competition. 

I thought the fact that 12GB would not POST correctly at DDR3-1333 or higher, storage controllers were on the fritz, and power management was not even working was more than minor, but it just accentuated the thought processes that we encounter on a daily basis now.   The current situation is not acceptable in our book but we would like to hear your opinions on this subject.  After receiving three new BIOS releases this morning to address performance improvements and not usability concerns, I just have to repeat Serenity Now, Serenity Now….

That said, let’s take a look at the EVGA X58 SLI, Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5, MSI Eclipse, and ASUS P6T-Deluxe motherboards today.

EVGA X58 SLI
IndexEVGA X58 SLIGigabyte GA-EX58-UD5MSI Eclipse X58ASUS P6T DeluxeTest SetupMemory PerformanceGeneral PerformanceGaming ResultsSATA, USB, Firewire and Ethernet PerformancePower ConsumptionInitial Overclocking ResultsFinal Words

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review, specifications, work with Xeon, overclocking and purchase in 2017

Contents Quite recently, it was an object of desire and an unaffordable luxury for most owners of processors on socket 1366. The motherboard belongs to the ultra-reliable class of motherboards, is made of materials that are much superior in quality to ordinary home motherboards, and is designed for a very large number of hours of operation for the home segment. Thanks to this, many copies have survived to this day and are still in demand, although already in the secondary market. The board can be used both with its native Intel Core I7 processors, and with Xeon server processors, of which there were quite a few for this socket. Expansion slots 2 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (supports x16/x16) 1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (in x4 mode) 2 x PCIe x1 1 x PCI 2.2 Nvidia SLI1 formula1 x1 90.3 90.3 x2 90.3 +x16 ATI CrossFireX Yes, x16+x16 Disk Subsystem 6 x SATA 3.0 Gb/s with SATA RAID 0, RAID 1 and x1 Power0 5 support eSATA 3.0 Gb/s 1 x eSATA 3.0 Gb/s 2 x SATA 6.0 Gb/s Fan headers 1 x for CPU cooler 4 x for case fans External ports 1 x PS/2 keyboard or mouse ports 2 x USB 3.0/2.0 ports 6 x1 USB 3.0/2.0 ports 6 x1 USB 3.0/2.0 ports ports 1 x Power eSATA 3Gb/s 1 x eSATA 3Gb/s 1 x optical S/PDIF 1 x IEEE 1394a 1 x LAN (RJ45) 6 audio jacks Internal ports 6 x USB 2. 0/1.1 2 x SATA 6.0 Gb/s 6 x SATA 3.0 Gb/s 1 x S/PDIF out 1 x IEEE 1394a 1 x COM Audio connectors of the front panel System panel connector form -factor and dimensions, mm ATX 305 x 244 mm Approximate price $ 100 — $ 150

9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 9000 turn attention to itself draws the cooling system. Here it is impeccably executed: radiators connected by a heat pipe perfectly remove heat from all important components of the board. At the same time, they are located so as not to interfere with the installation of other components.

Even massive coolers are easy to install and do not interfere with other components

The number of available ports is quite standard for boards of this class. Both USB 3.0 and high-speed SATA 6.0 Gb/s are available. Not all boards of that time can boast of this!

3 pci-e ports are available for installing video cards, but only two of them can work with Nvidia SLI and Ati CrossFireX technologies, but in the most productive x16 + x16 configuration. The third port only works in pci-e x4 mode.

Two pci-e x1 ports and one pci are also available. In addition, there is a com port, but there are no ide, lpt and fdd ports, so you won’t be able to connect an old hard drive or floppy directly.

As many as 8 phases are responsible for powering the processor, which will please fans of overclocking. For them, there are two jumpers on the board that increase the processor power supply to 2.0 V and the power supply of the RAM modules to 2.46 V. Chokes, mosfets, capacitors and other elements are of very high quality and are designed for long-term operation under heavy loads. The processor is powered, of course, via an 8-pin connector.

Speaking of memory: there are 6 slots for RAM, traditional for boards of this socket, operating in three-channel mode. 1866/1800/1600/1333/1066 frequencies are supported (more during overclocking). The maximum capacity is officially 24 gigabytes (6 x 4 GB), but the chances that the board will work with 8 GB modules are quite high. The maximum memory size in this case will be 48 gigabytes.

Overclocking

Bios sabertooth x58 is based on all familiar AMI codes. Unfortunately, not everything in it is perfect: there are no asus technologies for auto overclocking, and the range of changes in many values ​​​​is not as wide as we would like. Apparently, the direction of the board is aimed at long-term operation, and not at maximum overclocking.

Nevertheless, the available settings are enough to overclock Xeon or Core I7 processors to very good values. Available to change:

• Processor multiplier
• System bus frequency (100 — 500)
• PCI Express bus frequency (100 — 200)
• Memory divider (800/1066/1333/1600/1866/2013)3
• UCLK frequency (1600 — 5600), step 133
• QPI bus multiplier (Slow Mode, 4800 MT/s, 5866 MT/s, 6400 MT/s)
• Memory timings: CAS Latency, RAS to CAS, RAS PRE, RAS ACT, RAS to RAS, REF, WRITE Recovery, READ to PRE, FOUR ACT WIN
• CPU voltage (0. 85 — 2.1 V), step 0.00625
• Memory voltage (1.2 — 2.46 V), 0.01 step
• Southbridge voltage (1.1 — 1.4 V), 0.1 step
• And some other parameters

Taking 4.3-4.5 GHz for the Xeon X5600 series and similar processors on this board is quite realistic. Some succeed even more, here is an example of the X5670 running at 4700 MHz:

An example of BIOS settings for overclocking Xeon L5640:

Purchase and prices

Finding Asus Sabertooth x58 in stores is already unrealistic, so you will have to buy the board on aliexpress. Fortunately, you should not worry about the condition of the motherboard: the boards are sold, although used, but checked and passed all the necessary tests.

An example of a board that came from Ali. Traces of use are visible, but there are no functional shortcomings

Ali sellers:

• First
• second

9000 the most budget option for building a system on socket 1366. Although the board is based on the Intel X58 chipset, it lacks three-channel memory (only 2 slots) and some other advantages. The main advantage is the price. Compared to most other boards for this socket, huanan is almost 2 times cheaper.

Characteristics

In fact, with this name, several similar models of Chinese mothers are sold at once. Which one is the original Huanan and which one is his clone is now almost impossible to understand, but they are all very similar, both in appearance and in specifications.

The most popular clones are labeled x58 v311 and v108. Significant differences from the original could not be found.

The parameters are not outstanding at all, but this will be enough for home use. Here is what the manufacturer claims:0003

4 or 6 (as in x58 v311 ) phases are responsible for powering the processor, and power is supplied through an 8-pin connector. Support is declared for both four and six-core processors, including the Xeon W 3500-3600 series, but it is not recommended to install something more powerful than 95 W on Chinese products.

The bundle is not rich: a disk with drivers, instructions in Chinese and a sata cable

Cooling in the form of two radiators is rather weak, it is recommended to send at least 1 small cooler to the center of the board. By the way, there are only two connectors for them: 1 for the processor and 1 for the case fan.

Rear panel connectors

With the rest of the connectors, everything is quite standard for budget boards: 1 pci-e x16, 1 pci-e x1, 4 sata second version and 1 pci slot. USB as many as 10 pieces, of which there can be up to 2 usb version 3.0 (again, on revisions with dark radiators). In different versions, the number of slots may vary.

Version with yellow heatsinks, 4 phases and different location and number of slots

For RAM, as mentioned above, there are only two slots, but there is support for ecc brackets. Supported frequencies ddr3 1066/1333/1600 and a total of a maximum of 16 gigabytes of RAM.

Bios and overclocking

The board runs on the usual BIOS from American megatrends, but there are practically no settings for overclocking. In this case, it would be reasonable to install a processor with a sufficiently high stock frequency, for example, Xeon X5660 or X5670.

Bios boot screen

There are no complaints about the work itself, Windows 10 itself picked up all the necessary drivers, no errors were found in testing. The throttles whistle a little, but this is almost inaudible behind the noise of the coolers. The video card from Nvidia was determined and also worked quite correctly, but there may be problems with AMD.

In general, you can use Huanan X58 to build the most budget systems on lga1366. Although the board does not shine, it provides acceptable quality at an affordable price.

Purchase

The motherboard is sold on aliexpress, but in large cities you can also find it at flea markets, though usually much more expensive. It is most advantageous to take from trusted Chinese at the links below:

• The newest model from Hunananzhi
• Old version with dark radiators
• Similar model under Jingsha brand

Also sold in sets with processors and memory:

• With Xeon X5650 and 2×8 GB
• With Xeon X5570 and 2×8 GB

See other options here.