Mid-Range X79 Boards' VRM Tested, Equally Stable, Equally Flawed

[siopao1984]

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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.

In the event, XFastest compared the ECS X79R-AX, MSI X79A-GD45, ASRock X79 Extreme4, ASUS P9X79, and Gigabyte X79-UD3. Earlier this week, Gigabyte issued a press-release in which it acknowledged that some of its X79-UD3 motherboards may have got damaged by users as a result of bad firmware. It offered free replacements to affected users, and strongly recommended others to update the BIOS of their X79-UD3, X79-UD5, and G1.Assassin 2 motherboards to the latest one available on the company's support website. It is with this on the backdrops, that XFastest ran this public test. It recieved quite some attention from the local media, some company representatives were also present to witness the event.

XFastest set a common test bench with common components, which included Intel Core i7-3930K processor, Kingston HyperX memory, Antec PSU and high-performance CPU cooler. The test itself involved subjecting the motherboards' VRM to extreme stress, and measuring stability, performance, and VRM temperatures. This was done by setting CPU core voltage to 1.4V, maxing out the motherboards' load-line calibration (aggressive V-droop correction), and running multi-threaded Prime95 stress test.

The parameters on which the motherboards were evaluated on were:

• CPU VRM temperature, measured using a thermal probe attached to the VRM heatsink
• CPU Speed
• CPU voltage, effectiveness of the load-line calibration
• CPU temperature, measured using software

Read more: Mid-Range X79 Boards' VRM Tested, Equally Stable, Equally Flawed by VR-Zone.com

[siopao1984]

Specific to the motherboards tested, the results are as follows:

ECS X79R-AX

Turbo Boost was not functioning at extreme stress, so the CPU only ran at 3.20 GHz, voltage only remained around 1.34V, and hence VRM temperature stayed at 54.3 °C.



MSI X79A-GD45

This board, like the ECS one, stuck at 3.20 GHz, with MOSFET temperature of 65.2 °C.



ASRock X79 Extreme4

This board's VRM was found to be reliable, according to the reviewer, it reached and maintained 1.4V CPU VRM. The CPU ran at 3.50 GHz, but throttled down to 3.20 GHz under extreme stress. Its VRM temperature recorded 89.8 °C.

[siopao1984]

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



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