Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 X58 Motherboard Review

Memory Benchmarks

Everest Ultimate is the most useful tool for any and all benchmarkers or overclockers. With the ability to pick up most voltage, temperature, and fan sensors on almost every motherboard available, Everest provides the ability to customize the outputs in a number of forms on your desktop. In addition to this, the memory benchmarking utility provides a useful tool of measuring the changes to your memory sub-system.


Since the memory was set to DDR3-1600 for both the stock and overclocked configurations it is no surprise that the bandwidth numbers are so similar. Likewise, the Uncore clock (UCLK), which is the memory controller and shared L3 cache, is locked at 3200Mhz for both configurations, so there is no performance benefit from that area. We are seeing a roughly 5% improvement in write speeds, and this may be attributable to the higher QPI Link rate (3200Mhz --> 3600Mhz) and CPU frequency. One way or another, the Core i7 platform's triple-channel interface delivers an immense amount of memory bandwidth and it absolutely destroys even the most highly-clocked Core 2 system.



The memory latency is effectively identical between both configurations, and any differences can easily be attributed to normal benchmarking variances. These latency results are impressively low and you clearly see the benefits of the integrated memory controller (IMC).



Although last updated almost 3 years ago, and despite its rudimentary interface, ScienceMark v2.0 remains a favorite for accurately calculating bandwidth on even the newest chipsets.


ScienceMark reveals a respectable 6% increase in overall memory bandwidth going from the stock to overclocked settings. What is more interesting to note is the fact that at stock this motherboards seems to be quite a bit faster than either the EVGA X58 SLI and the Rampage II Extreme, obviously Gigabyte's BIOS engineers are doing something right.