Review: Gigabyte MW70-3S0

by Tarinder Sandhu on 22 January 2016, 15:01

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Testing methodology

Comparison Motherboard Configurations

 
Gigabyte MW70-3S0
Supermicro X10-DAL-i
Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI
BIOS
F1
1.20
F6h
Chipset Revision
Intel C612
Intel Z170
CPU
2x Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3
Intel Core i7-6700K
Memory
32GB Crucial (8x4GB) DDR4-2,133 RDIMM
32GB G.Skill (4x8GB) DDR4-2,600
Memory Timings
15-15-15-36-2T @ 2,133MHz
Discrete Graphics
Nvidia GeForce Titan X (361.43 drivers)
System Drive
SK hynix SL301 500GB
Power Supply
Enermax Platimax 1,200W
Operating System
Windows 10 Pro (64-bit)

Benchmarks

Cinebench R15 Using Cinebench's multi-CPU render, this cross-platform benchmark stresses all cores
wPrime 2.1.0 Stressing all cores, this number-crunching test puts the onus on the CPU
Handbrake 0.10.2.7286 Free-to-use video encoder that stresses all CPU cores (64-bit)
AIDA64 5.60.3732 beta Used for memory analysis and CPU-centric benchmarks
SPECwpc v2.0 Six selected tests that focus on CPU and GPU equally

Miscellaneous Benchmarks

Power Power consumption when idle, 2D load (LuxRender) and 3D load (Maya)

Notes

We're comparing the performance of the Gigabyte MW70-3S0 against another board based on the same chipset and supporting the same processor, Supermicro's X10-DAL-i.

Gigabyte makes specific mention of the ability to run system memory at 2,133MHz speeds when all DIMMs are populated. The board had no problem in running our 32GB of Crucial memory at its native frequency. The board's BIOS, too, is simple and effective, but do bear in mind that it does not support explicit overclocking. Gigabyte carries over the ability to update the BIOS by having the board connected to the PSU alone. Kind of handy when matters go awry.

As a point of comparison against a high-end desktop of early 2016, we've also re-run numbers on an Intel Core i7-6700K processor on top of Gigabyte Z170 motherboard with the latest BIOS that alleviates the Skylake bug issue. Keeping consistency, we also have 32GB of DDR4 memory.