The PC Health is an often neglected, but very important page in that you can keep close tabs on how your system is doing with temperatures and fan operation. While this page has never "saved" me, it is something I pay attention to on a fairly regular basis.

The MB Intelligent Tweaker page is where the fun really begins. It is here where the majority of tweaks and tricks are done to improve performance. You can adjust the CPU FSB or ratio if your processor is unlocked. If doing things manually scares you, Gigabyte's CPU Intelligent Accelerator 2 is designed to automatically adjust CPU power to maximize system performance. There's a number of presets which will come into play depending on the CPU load. The minimum Cruise control is 5%, and the maximum Full Thrust is 19%.

Like the CPU, graphics and PCI Express can be tweaked as well as the memory.

Test Setup

The Gigabyte X48-DQ6 will be equipped with an Intel E6750 clocked at 2.66GHz and Corsair Dominator DDR2. A Seagate Barracuda 1TB will handle the storage duties and a GeForce 8800GTX running ForceWare Release 169 for our video needs. Windows Vista Ultimate is the OS of choice, fully patched up to the time of testing.

The comparison motherboard will be the MSI X48 Platinum with identical hardware save for the memor which will be Crucial's Ballistix DDR3.

The software used is as follows:

- We ran the memory bandwidth benchmark.

- A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

- CDex v170b2 was used to convert a 440.5MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

- We used an Animatrix file, titled , and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

DVD Shrink - We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to 70%. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

- Photoshop is perhaps the defacto standard when it comes to photo editing tools. Given that it is so popular, we incorporated DriverHeaven's latest test into our review process. Lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars @ 640x480 and Crysis @ 800x600 at LQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. Higher scores are better. We used Guru3D's Crysis benchmark tool and the for ETQW.

All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average scores being displayed. Any system tweaks and ram timings were configured to the best possible for each platform. Despite the slight differences between the motherboards, we matched the tweaks as close as possible. The drivers otherwise were identical.

Sandra XII Memory

The MSI X48 is slightly quicker here given it's using faster memory. The difference is not incredibly wide though.

PiFast

Very close results here. Both take 28 seconds basically, but the MSI still comes a little ahead.

CDeX

Like our PiFast test, there's a very small margin between the two boards.