Gigabyte P55-UD6 LGA1156 Motherboard Review‏

Synthetic Benchmarks

Lavalys Everest Ultimate v5.02

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. We selected two of Everest's seven CPU benchmarks: CPU Queen and FPU Mandel. According to Lavalys, CPU Queen simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic "Queens problem" on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. The FPU Mandel benchmark measures the double precision (also known as 64-bit) floating-point performance through the computation of several frames of the popular "Mandelbrot" fractal. Both tests consume less than 1 MB system memory, and are Hyper-Threading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core (CMP) aware.


As you can see, the Gigabyte model pulls away a little in this test, while the other four models are
roughly equivalent. The reason for this is that the P55-UD6 has a stock BCLK of ~136Mhz instead of the standard 133Mhz. It's not a new trick, but it works. The reason the Intel DP55KG falls behind in the FPU Mandel test is because it utilizes a 1X lower Turbo Boost multiplier throughout the benchmark.


Lavalys Everest Ultimate v5.02

As part of its enthusiast favourite Cache & Memory Benchmark, Everest provides very useful and in-depth cache performance figures. For this chart, we have combined the read, write, and copy bandwidth figures to achieve an aggregate bandwidth figure for each cache stage.


Once again, we see the P55-UD6 lead the pack because of its BCLK advantage. The CPU core is running faster, the Uncore (which contains the L3 cache) is running faster, thus it's obvious that the Gigabyte board would lead this test.


Lavalys Everest Ultimate v5.02

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.


At DDR3-1333 7-7-7, all five motherboards perform roughly the same. The Gigabyte's memory frequency is actually closer to DDR3-1360, which is reveals itself in the read & write speeds, but the board falls behind a bit in copy bandwidth.


According to Everest, the ASUS and Gigabyte models are effectively equal in the memory latency department. The DP55KG keeps its crown as latency champion at the moment, largely due to its more aggressive default secondary memory timings.


Now let's see if ScienceMark echoes these results.

ScienceMark v2.0

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.


Unsurprisingly, because of its 2.2% higher BCLK, the P55-UD6 has a 2.2% memory bandwidth lead over the #2 Maximus III Formula. The only slight laggard is MSI's P55-GD80, which is about 2% slower than the rest.


This was an actual surprise. We expected the P55-UD6 to have among the lowest memory latency, but not by almost 7%. No matter how many times we ran the benchmark, it would always average out to about 28.6X so the result is good, if not a little odd.

Because of its higher than reference BCLK, it's not surprising to see the P55-UD6 take the lead in all the synthetic benchmarks, but will the results be any different in real-life applications? Let's find out.