Gigabyte GA-EP45T-Extreme Motherboard Review

Memory Benchmarks

Everest Ultimate is the most useful tool for any and all bench markers or overclockers. With the ability to read most voltage, temperature, and fan sensors on almost every motherboard available, Everest provides the ability to customize the outputs in a number of forms for display on your desktop. In addition to this, the memory benchmarking provides a useful tool of measuring the changes to your memory sub-system when tweaking to measure the differences.

The bandwidth numbers scale nicely with the XMP profile thanks to a nice tRD (Performance Level) of 7. This can actually be tightened to 6 manually and the board shouldn't have a problem with it so these bandwidth numbers could be even higher for the XMP results. This is our first indication of how much performance improves with a performance kit of memory, and remember, there is no fiddling required with XMP memory. Just install it and select the XMP profile in the BIOS, the system does the rest.

The latency results are exactly what we were expecting and quite frankly, don't make much sense. With higher front side bus, higher memory frequency, tighter timings, and more CPU frequency; this should be a lot bigger gap. The tRD is the only thing that is loosened up from the stock to the XMP profile but not as much as this would suggest.

ScienceMark is an almost ancient benchmark utility at this point in time and hasn't seen an update in a long time. It is, however, still a favorite for accurately calculating bandwidth on even the newest chipsets.

ScienceMark confirms what Everest has already told us, the bandwidth scales nicely with the XMP modules running at 900MHz or DDR3-1800.