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Mid-Range X79 Boards' VRM Tested, Equally Stable, Equally Flawed
On Wednesday, Taiwanese tech community site XFastest ran a public event where it tested five similarly-priced mid-range socket LGA2011 motherboards for CPU VRM performance and stability. This comes at a particularly-important time for Gigabyte, when it's faced with CPU VRM problems that it's dealing with. The results are in.
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ASUS P9X79
This board recorded high-levels of stability, even if at the expense of warmer VRM. The CPU voltage, instead of being throttled, crept up beyond the specified 1.4V, to 1.45V, the CPU maintained 3.50 GHz throughout the test. The CPU VRM temperature was measured to be 85.1 °C.
GIGABYTE X79-UD3
Finally, the board that earned some infamy over the past few weeks. The X79-UD3 used the BIOS which GIGABYTE prescribed to users, version F7. Its CPU voltage remained at 1.392V against the set 1.4V, its load-line calibration maintained it at that, but couldn't quite get it to 1.4V. No big problem there. The CPU ran at 3.50 GHz throughout the test, and VRM temperature recorded was 83.9 °C.
Summary of results
|
Board Make |
CPU speed |
CPU voltage |
CPU temperature |
Mosfet Temperature |
|
ECS |
3.2 GHz |
1.34v |
n/a |
54.3 °C |
|
MSI |
3.2 GHz |
n/a |
n/a |
65.2 °C |
|
Asrock |
3.5 GHz-3.2 GHz- 1.2 GHz |
1.4v |
n/a |
89.8 °C |
|
ASUS |
3.5 GHz |
1.44v |
75 |
85.1 °C |
|
GIGABYTE |
3.5 GHz |
1.392v |
67 |
83.9 °C |
The immediate conclusion that can be drawn out of this is that all LGA2011 motherboards in this price-range have their own unique limitations, and that with the corrective F7 BIOS, Gigabyte's X79-UD3 performs well against its competitors. ASRock X79 Extreme4 and ASUS P9X79 were the most electrically-stable boards, Gigabyte X79-UD3 and ASUS P9X79 were the most CPU clock-stable ones.
Source: XFastest
