GIGABYTE X99-SOC Champion Motherboard Review: Low Cost X99 Overclocking
by Ian Cutress on January 5, 2015 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- Gigabyte
- Overclocking
- X99
CPU Performance
Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things, including better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal) at the expense of heat and temperature. It also gives in essence an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, memory subtimings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the system build.
For reference, the GIGABYTE X99-SOC Champion on BIOS F1b did not have any form of MultiCore Turbo.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.
Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Image Manipulation – FastStone Image Viewer 4.9: link
Similarly to WinRAR, the FastStone test us updated for 2014 to the latest version. FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and thus single threaded performance is often the winner.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. The principle today is still the same, primarily as an output for H.264 + AAC/MP3 audio within an MKV container. In our test we use the same videos as in the Xilisoft test, and results are given in frames per second.
Rendering – PovRay 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision RayTracer, or PovRay, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
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zepi - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
Anandtech should check on the rumours that some Motherboard and Graphics card manufacturers are silently rolling out Rev 2.0 boards with inferior quality components through retail channels without updating their product listing websites etc.Especially Gigabyte has been targeted by this rumour, but you should investigate this about other vendors as well.
I'm sure that some retailers would be more than willing to co-operate about such information assuming a bit of visibility.
Jasmij - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
That Gigabyte is having revisions for costdown is not a rumour, please see this article: http://us.hardware.info/reviews/5835/spot-the-diff...RaistlinZ - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
Yeah, I read that too. I hope it's only limited to their super low-cost boards. But Anandtech should certainly follow up in a Rev 2.0 of this board is realeased and make sure Gigabyte isn't cutting back on quality, features or performance.bobmitch - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
Also beware of the USB 3.0 issue with Gigabyte. Their boards fail to boot up with a USB 3.0 external peripheral attached. In addition, the latest set of bios releases cause the CPU to throttle. No static overclocking is available...doublecheck your boardEvilNodZ - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
I had this problem with my USB3.0 external HDD connected to my X99 Gigabyte Gaming 5 motherboard and after contacting to customer support i was given a few Beta Bios that eventually sorted this problem with the front ports on my case after feedback they sorted it with all my ports. So they are aware of the problem and already have a fix in development.I havent checked if the new Bios released fixes the problem yet since i don't have any problems with my beta bios i have not updated yet.
Samus - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
I haven't had a quality gigabyte board since the P35-series. The H61 and B85 I've come across were both problematic. The H61 had a lot of BIOS bugs (and the last BIOS before end-of-life didn't fix them, such as fan controls and UEFI secure boot problems) and the B85 was just downright unstable. I eventually tracked the problems down to the Quadro K2000 that was installed by installing a GT430. I don't think the board has proper power regulation to power a spec PCIe GPU that doesn't have aux power input. At first I thought it was the power supply and I tried replacing it the Corsair CX430 with a Seasonic 500-watt but the random reboots still persisted in Adobe Illustrator.That Quadro K2000 has been running for months in a Dell with a H81 chipset without issues. It is just the Gigabyte B85 board that can't supply enough power to the PCIe slot.
I've had better luck with MSI lately than Gigabyte, and that's kind of depressing. MSI has come a long way and Gigabyte is falling apart. Asus and occasionally Asrock are still my go-to brands, though.
chizow - Monday, January 12, 2015 - link
I never had this problem with my Gigabyte X99 Gaming 5, but had a slew of other issues that would have prevented me from recommending this board.The main two would have been:
1) Overclocking required a LOT of voltage. Much more than similar OCs for other boards, like the Asus and MSI boards. I needed 1.3V for 4.4GHz on my i7 5820K and I still wasn't totally satisfied it was stable OC.
2) RAM would not run rated specs above 2133MHz (technically OC above that for X99), even with RAM with XMP rated higher.
They have both been resolved in the latest BIOS update here, so I am pretty happy with it now: F8b
http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyte/28441-gigabyt...
Before that, there were some of the worst BIOS issues I have ever encountered, failed boot loops, fail to boot with RAID array, fail to POST with molex power connected to board, yeah. Rough launch for X99 for sure, but glad to see they are still working on improving the boards. Definitely don't waste time with the official BIOS or stock BIOS if you want to OC at all, go to the link above and grab the latest!
Overall though, great platform, extremely fast, all modern amenities with tons of native USB 3.0, 10xSATA3, and up to 40 lanes of PCIe 3.0. Just a lot of growing pains, more than I can remember with any new chipset.
SumGuy954 - Thursday, January 8, 2015 - link
Awesome specs on the board, and love the looks of it. One issue. I hate sideways Sata ports. I really hate it when they are sideways. Access is difficult when it is installed in a case. Finding angled cables wit the notch pin the right direction can be very frustrating. I wish none of them did this.imaheadcase - Tuesday, January 13, 2015 - link
I agree, I kind of wish they found someway to put the sata ports, or all ports in the back of motherboards so you can hook them up through holes on other side of care. They would eliminate the need for any cable management since all cables would go straight to back of case area. I guess this is a manufacturing difficulty that is to hard to address.But at the very least, why can't they put all ports on top of the board so all cables can drape back behind board?
nraglin - Monday, August 17, 2015 - link
Does this motherboard support Mac OS?