Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 LGA1366 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.


This is going to be fairly boring benchmarking section since most of the results are statistical dead heats, but there are a few instances in which either motherboard really distinguishes itself.

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.


Although the L1 and L2 cache results are effectively identical, the X58A-UD7's L3 results are much higher than the the Rampage II Extreme's (RIIE). The reason for this disparity has something to do with how each motherboard handles the seemingly innocuous C-STATE processor setting.

While it was enabled for both motherboards, the RIIE takes a hit in the L3 department with it enabled. With C-STATE disabled, its L3 cache results are very much inline with the UD7's.

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.


In the memory bandwidth realm, the RIIE does manage to outperform the UD7 in both write and copy speeds. Everest memory benchmarking on the Bloomfield/X58 platform never really provides stable results since all of the CPU technology that is constantly changing clock speeds really affects the results.

The X58A-UD7 could achieve similar write results as the RIIE only once every 10 or so runs, but it never came close to matching the copy bandwidth.


The Gigabyte motherboard definitely has the memory latency advantage according to Everest, but 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.


While Everest showed the Rampage II Extreme as beating the X58A-UD7 in two of three bandwidth tests, ScienceMark really illustrates the difference with the RIIE having a 6% memory bandwidth lead over the X58A-UD7.


When it comes to memory latency, the ScienceMark results mirror the Everest ones, which is to say that the UD7 has the lowest memory latency.

While interesting, these are all the synthetic benchmarks, so will the results be any different in real-life applications? Let's find out.