Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme LGA 1366 i7 Motherboard Review

PCMark Vantage

Futuremark’s newest benchmark suite, PCMark Vantage, was released earlier this year we published an initial article on the new software that looked at some CPU performance as well as providing overviews for all the individual testing suites it uses and what kind of applications they emulate.  The new Vantage software takes a much more real-world user-scenario approach to testing that previous PCMark software and as such deserves more time our benchmark analysis. 

We’ve seen the EX58-Extreme have some ups and downs in a variety of benchmarks today, and our PCMark Vantage scores follow suit with other scores we’ve seen through the evaluation. The overall PCMark score is a measure of a user’s computer performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security. For typical computer tasks, the EX58-Extreme simply doesn’t stand out that much from the other LGA 1366 boards on the market. But, this is to be expected because Gigabyte has geared this particular motherboard toward the most hardcore overclockers on the planet, so customizing drivers toward basic computer functions probably wasn’t high on Gigabyte’s priority list.