Gigabyte P67A-UD3 Intel Sandy Bridge motherboard review

by Tarinder Sandhu on 17 January 2011, 10:40 3.0

Tags: Gigabyte (TPE:2376)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qa3zg

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How we test

Gallery

Comparison systems

Motherboard Gigabyte P67A-UD3 Intel DB67HL ASUS P8P67 Deluxe ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme
Motherboard BIOS F5 10H 0804 1102
Processor Intel Core i5 2500K AMD Phenom II X6 1055T
Chipset driver Intel Inf 9.2.0.1019 and RST 10.1 Catalyst 10.12 chipset driver
Memory Corsair 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3
Memory timings 9-9-9-24-1T @ 1,333MHz
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB
Graphics driver Catalyst 10.12
Disk drive Corsair V128 SSD
Optical drive Sony AD-7263S
Chassis Corsair Obsidian Series 700D
Power supply Corsair HX1000W
Operating system Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

CPU and memory benchmarks

AIDA64 v1.50.1200 The successor to Everest - useful for measuring memory bandwidth and latency
HEXUS.PiFast
Our number-crunching benchmark stresses a single core by calculating Pi to 10m places
wPrime 2.0.4 Another number-crunching benchmark that stresses all available CPU cores/threads
CINEBENCH 11.5 Using Cinebench's multi-CPU render, this cross-platform benchmark stresses all cores
7zip 9.20 We use the built-in benchmark in this open-source file-compression utility
TrueCrypt 7.0a An encryption/decryption benchmark that's partial to AES acceleration

GPU benchmarks

StarCraft II DX9, 1,280x720 low quality and 1,680x1,050 medium quality.
Call of Duty: Black Ops DX9, 1,680x1,050, 4xAA, high quality
3DMark Vantage b1.2 Run at the default performance preset

General benchmarks

Storage performance USB 2.0/3.0 read speed, SSD average read speed 
Power consumption While idling and when running wPrime

Testing notes

We've paired the Gigabyte board up with the Intel Core i5 2500K chip. Providing comparison performance numbers is another P67 board from ASUS - P8P67 Deluxe - and an H67 board from Intel. All three run with a Radeon HD 6950 2GB card in the primary slot. Being as all-inclusive as possible, we've selected the best AMD chip and motherboard combination for a similar outlay to the Gigabyte board and Sandy Bridge CPU.