Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 LGA1366 Motherboard Review

Voltage Regulation / Power Consumption

Our voltage regulation testing will focus on the various voltages and the differences encountered between what is selected in the BIOS, what is reported by EasyTune6 (when available), and what is reported by a digital multi-meter (DMM). We have found eight voltage read points on the motherboard so the vCore, CPU PLL, QPI/VTT, QPI PLL, IOH Core, ICH Core, PCIE, and DRAM will be recorded with our DMM. The ground point used for all readings were a screw hole. Here are a few images showing the various read points used.


Now that we have established where the read points are, let’s have a look at the results. These measurements were taken at stock system speeds and with C1E, C-STATE, SpeedStep, Turbo Boost, and Thermal Monitor disabled in the BIOS. Just to clarify, the vCore (LLC) section is the vCore results with Load-Line Calibration Level 2 enabled. Here are our extensive findings:


Taken as a whole, the X58A-UD7 has very good voltage output. There is very little variance between what you select in the BIOS and what the board actually outputs. The CPU PLL, QPI PLL, IOH Core, ICH Core, PCI-E, and DRAM voltages are effectively perfect, showing no variance between idle and load states. The QPI/VTT has a certainly level of droopage, but it's quite minimal. Those of you manually setting the memory speeds above DDR3-1333 will want to manually set the voltage as well, since as you can see the auto voltages for QPI/VTT and DRAM get very high at DDR3-1600.

With LLC disabled, the output of the vCore is a little lower than we would like, but at least the line droop (vDroop) is fairly minimal at approximately 2%, well within the vDroop spec. When LLC is enabled, the vDroop is effectively neutralized and the output is also improved. Given how critical the vCore is, let's take a closer look at its characteristics under full load with two one-hour OCCT runs. For both runs our processor will be running at 4.0Ghz with 1.32Vcore, once with LLC disabled, once with it enabled and set to Level 2:



With Load-Line Calibration disabled, the vCore line droops by a little over 2.5% under heavy load, which is perfectly fine. We do wish that there weren't any spikes during the test though, but they are quite minor.



With Load-Line Calibration enabled, we see that once the LLC takes effect the vDroop is eliminated, and the vCore stays within the 1.25-1.25V range line is absolutely perfect. Absolutely we would prefer to see a perfectly straight vCore line, but this result is nevertheless very good.

Power Consumption

All motherboard manufacturers boast that their products have the lowest power consumption and feature the latest new development in energy efficiency. Well that is what we are here to find out. For this test, every BIOS option was reset to its stock setting and the Windows Vista power plan was changed from High Performance to Balanced.

For our idle test, we let the system idle for 15 minutes and measured the peak wattage through our UPM EM100 power meter.

For our CPU load test, we ran Prime 95 In-place large FFTs on all available threads for 15 minutes, measuring the peak wattage via the UPM EM100 power meter.

For our overall system load test, we ran Prime 95 In-place large FFTs on all available threads for 15 minutes, while simultaneously loading the GPU with OCCT v3.1.0 GPU:OCCT stress test at 1680x1050@60Hz in fullscreen mode.


With its brand new 24-phase PWM and more modern MOSFETs, it is no surprise to see that the X58A-UD7 uses quite a bit less power at every stage than the venerable Rampage II Extreme. A fairer test will be when we compare this motherboard to one of ASUS' second-generation X58 motherboards, like the P6X58D Premium.