Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4

Testing Methods:

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra, all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 torture test on all cores and expanding to a looping 3DMark06. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

Test Setup:

Systems:

• Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4
  
• MSI P35 Platinum
  
• Abit IX38 QuadGT

Common Components:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 (8x333MHz);
  
• 2GB DDR2 800MHz at 3-3-3-9-1T timings, (where possible)
  
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT
  
• Two AMD Radeon HD 3870 512MB in CrossFire
  
• PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750W PSU
  
• Seagate 7200.9 250GB SATA Hard Drive
  
• Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit
  
• Nvidia Forceware 169.25
  
• ATI Catalyst 8.2

All of the systems were ran at 800MHz 3-3-3-9-18-2T timings because the Gigabyte and MSI P35 boards didn't have a 1T option, and the Abit X38 board wasn't stable when using 1T.

We did initially test the board with the DES software enabled and disabled to evaluate its impact on performance, however we had issues with certain settings that were later fixed in a software update too close to the date of publishing in order to re-evaluate the entire set of benchmarks. We decided to approach this in more depth in a future article, looking at the range of "energy efficient" motherboards from all tier one manufacturers. For now, we have just tested the core performance of the Gigabyte motherboard with the software disabled.