Gigabyte X170-Extreme ECC (Intel C236) Motherboard Review

System Performance

I Initially started to test enterprise-grade motherboards without a graphics card and relied solely on the built-in features. This was based on the fact that we want to test the motherboard itself and less the connected parts. With the C612 chipset boards, it wasn’t a problem as they all had onboard GPU, but these C230-series boards don’t have that and I’m using a Xeon CPU without iGPU.

As this screws up the comparison with previously tested boards, the charts below are lacking some of the comparison figures from previous tests. Those will be added and updated as I retest them with the same setup as used in this review.

The graphics card used is still a low-powered one because we still want to test the motherboard itself and see what it can perform. Having a dedicated GPU in the system also allows more tests to be run.

GeekBench3

PassMark PerformanceTest 8.0

SPECwpc 1.2

SPECwpc is the first benchmark to measure all key aspects of workstation performance based on diverse professional applications. The latest version is SPECwpc V1.2 (introduced on June 3, 2015), which extends performance measurement from physical to virtualized workstations. Results from SPECwpc V1.2 are comparable to those from SPEC V1.0.4, but not to any version before that.

More than 30 workloads are included in SPECwpc V1.2 to test CPU, graphics, I/O and memory bandwidth. The tests are divided into the application categories listed below. Individual scores are generated for each test and a composite score for each category is generated based on a reference machine, yielding a “bigger is better” result. The reference machine has the following configuration: x3430 processor, 8GB (4x2GB) memory, V4800 graphics, and SATA 7.2k rpm hard disk drive.

Summary Scores

IOmeter Scores

Group Scores