Gigabyte X79-UD7 - The Overclocking Motherboard That Never Was

Performance and Benchmarks

In this section we will be directly comparing the performance of the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD7 against that of the Intel reference X79 board, the DX79SI. The configurations are exactly identical between both systems with the exception of one parameter, the motherboard.

Setup
Intel Core i7 3960X w/Intel reference water cooling
Gigabyte GA-X79-UD7
Kingston HyperX 1600MHz 16GB DDR3 and Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz 16GB DDR3 (for overclocking)
AMD Radeon 6950 with unlocked shaders (to 6970 shader count and clock speed)
Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD
Cooler Master UCP 1100W PSU


SiSoft Sandra 2012

In Sandra 2012, we see that the Gigabyte UD7 scored 184.62 GIPS and 131.80 GFLOPS in the Arithmetic test. Interestingly enough, we used the exact same settings (turbo enabled, etc.) as we did on our stock Intel motherboard when we did the Core i7 3960X review, and the Gigabyte board actually shows a 20% improvement over the Intel board in the Dhrystone test, handily beating the 990X and Core i72600K. The Intel board scored 150.28 GIPs and 119.45 GFLOPS.

In the Cryptography test, we saw similar results when comparing the Gigabyte board to the Intel board. With the Intel board we got 10.307 GB/s of Encryption/Decryption bandwidth, but with the X79-UD7 we got 12.531 GB/s indicating yet another 20% bump in performance. In the hashing bandwidth test, we saw a slight improvement over the Intel board, showing 1.593 GB/s comapred to the Intel board’s 1.477 GB/s.

In the Memory Bandwidth test, we were expecting to see the best results since this board is really tuned for memory performance, and we were not disappointed. Compared to the Intel board, the X79-UD7 gained about 10% in both the float and integer memory bandwidth tests, with the Gigabyte board coming in slightly over 40 GB/s while the Intel board came in around 37 GB/s on both tests.

AIDA64


In AIDA64, the results we got were similarly astonishing. We are not sure whether or not the Intel board was being held back or if the Gigabyte board is simply pushing the performance limits of the processor and RAM.

In the CPU Queen test, the results were almost identical, with the Intel board actually coming in just a fraction of a percent higher at 62196 vs 62121.

In the AES test, though, there was a large disparity between the two boards once again. Interestingly enough, the Gigabyte board at stock clocks actually scored similarly to the Intel board at an overclock of 4.8GHz. Looking at the raw stock scores, the X79-UD7 scored a 776677 vs 656612 on the Intel board. This once again represents a near 20% increase in performance even though the processor, memory, and accompanying settings are the same.

When it came to memory latency, the Gigabyte X79-UD7 once again outperformed the Intel board. The Intel board reported a latency of 53.5 ns while the UD7 reported 50.0 ns.

When it came to memory writes in AIDA64, the Gigabyte X79-UD7 was slightly faster than the Intel board, coming in at 17625 MB/s vs the Intel DX79SI which achieved 17085. We do not consider this much of a performance difference, but even so, the UD7 is the slight winner here.