CPU Performance Results

We spent a couple of weeks with the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 before beginning our performance testing, running various configurations and CPUs, and checking hardware compatibility. We verified our power consumption numbers using various different power supplies, and played a few hours of games with some members of the TPU community to get an overall feel for the board and to verify stability. Once completed, we tore down the system, mounted our Noctua cooler and put the board through the paces.

SuperPi

SuperPI serves as our memory-focused benchmark, being highly single-threaded. The Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 ended up on the top of the pile of all Intel products we have tested, a good showing, for sure.

wPrime

wPrime is much more CPU-focused, but memory plays its role as well. In this test, the numbers were much closer, but the GA-X79-UD5 was just a bit faster than the ECS X79R-AX.

WinRAR

Part of our motherboard benchmarking suite is the built-in benchmark that is part of the WinRAR software suite. In this test, the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 put up good numbers, however, we noticed performance a fair bit below what we noticed on the ECS X79R-AX, but also higher than the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe we looked at just a couple of weeks ago.

AIDA64

We employed AIDA64's memory bench to highlight memory bandwidth. We isolate the write performance metric as it serves as a good indicator of overall memory performance. Again the GA-X79-UD5 ended up just above the ECS X79R-AX, but only by 31 MB/s.

HandBrake Encoding

Handbrake is used for encoding testing, and provided results much similar to the previous benchmarks, with the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 sitting a nearly two FPS ahead of our previously best result.

CineBench Encoding

In Cinebench, the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 was a bit slower than the other tested Intel X79 Express products on the GPU side, but the CPU portion again showed the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 as the top performer, bar none.