Conclusion

General		+	-
At a first glance we were surprised that the Gigabyte GA-7PESLX is very similar to the GA-7PESH1 when you look at it from a layout point of view. Of course the socket is not the same (LGA1356 vs LGA2011), the memory architecture as well (Triple channel vs Quad Channel) and also the PCB colour (most important ;) ) went from ultra fast blue to green. It was also possible to install large CPU coolers, which would be usful if you want to build a high-end workstation that operates at low noise level. Another nice addition is the LSI RAID Controller which is capable of managing up to eight drives. Therefore it is also worth mentioning that the RAID Controller has been connected via eight lanes. In other words, there is plenty of bandwidth.		- Design - LSI RAID Controller
Layout		+	-
Looking at the DIMM slots showed that they have been placed very close to the CPU sockets. Like this Gigabyte has been able to save some space which they needed because of the expansion slots. In fact there is a good mix. What you get is two PCI Express x16 Gen3 slots, two PCI Express x8 working at only x4 (one is Gen3 the other is Gen2) slots as well as another PCI Express x4 Gen2 slot. If you for example want to install a high performance PCI Express SSD then you'll be happy about the PCI Express x8 Gen3 Slots. We also have to mention that Gigabyte put the main PCIe 16x quite close to the last DIMM slot. Never the less this causes no issues since we managed to install a high end graphics card equipped with a backplate and it didn't collide with the memory modules.		- Location of DIMM Slots - Expansion Slots - PCI Express Gen3 - LSI SAS 2008
Performance		+	-
The performance when using synthetic and theorical benchmarks is just impressive. Performance is really up to twice as high when using two instead of only one processor. But sadly you won't see the same for real world workloads. Simply because todays software isn't ready for that many threads. Of course you will see benefits with such a machine if you require heavy computing workload or a virtual machine. We also noticed a huge performance drop regarding the memory and cache bandwidth when enabling the HyperThreading technology. Talking about the performance of the Xeon E5-2470 versus the Xeon E5-2690, one can see that on average under both synthetic benchmarks and real world workloads the Xeon E5-2470 is about 15 to 20 % slower.		- Synthetic Benchmarks	- Memory and Cache Bandwidth when HyperThreading is enabled.
BIOS		+	-
The BIOS is of course well furnished for a server use. But only in this case. As we said already this motherboard is not designed for the enthusiast market so that's normal. But anyway we would have liked to have a BIOS with more configuration settings for clock frequency and memory timings for exemple.		- Lots of WorkSation/server settings	- Free of enthusiasts settings
Recommendation		+	-
This motherboard has been designed for professional use. We see several cenarios where this board makes a lot of sense, where one of which is virtualisation. Thanks to the onboard SLI SAS controller you can also assemble an IOPS monster based on up to eight fast SSDs. Furthermore you could also build a powerful workstation for video or audio editing.		- Worksation - Server - Running several virtual machines	- Overclocking - Gaming - Desktop
Rating
We give the Gigabyte GA-7PESLX four out of five stars.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 9 - Synthetic - Memory & Cache Bandwidth/Latency
Page 2 - Specifications / Delivery	Page 10 - Synthetic - Cryptography & Arithmetic
Page 3 - Layout	Page 11 - Synthetic - Multi-Media & Mutli-Core Efficiency
Page 4 - Connectors and I/O	Page 12 - Real World - Office Productivity & Data Analysis
Page 5 - BIOS	Page 13 - Real World - System Management
Page 6 - Test setup	Page 14 - Real World - Media Creation & 3D Modeling
Page 7 - Synthetic - WPrime1024 & UCBench 2011	Page 15 - Conclusion
Page 8 - Synthetic - CineBench

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Author: c.ney@ocaholic.ch Copy edited and translated: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch c.ney@ocaholic.ch