Conclusion

General		+	-
At a first glance the GA-6PXSV3 is a very good looking workstation motherboard. We like the fact that Gigabyte took care of of its look. Design aside this motherboard comes with an Intel C604 chipset on an ATX form factor which is rare. Therefore you can take advantage of what the C604 has to offer in an ATX case. The GA-6PXSV3 supports Intel Xeon E5-1600/2600 processor families as well as Intel Core series and SLI/CrossFire like almost all other single socket LGA2011 motherboards. What's special about this one is the memory support. While other manufacturers ship their workstation motherboards with memory support up to DDR3-1333 MHz, Gigabyte offers DDR3-1600 MHz support. Here the GA-6PXSV3 support up to eight RDIMM ECC 16GB modules 1.35v at DDR3-1600 MHz.		- Design - DDR3-1600 MHz Support - C604 & ATX - Xeon & Core Support - SLI/CrossFire
Layout		+	-
Regarding the expansion slots what you get here are two PCI Express x16 Gen3 slots working at x16 and one PCI Express x4 Gen2 working at only x2. This last one has a limited bandwidth of 1 GB/s so if you for example want to install a high performance PCI Express SSD we recommand you to install it on one of the PCIex16 go get the max of it. Like on the two other WS boards from Gigabyte we tested you also find an ASPEED 2D graphics chip on the GA-6PXSV3, very useful if you want to save power consumption costs or if you don't use your workstation for 3D. This time Gigabyte also included an audio chip which is interesting to have if you need normal audio to spare a PCIe slot. If you are going to do audio work though then you will need a professional sound card because this integrated one won't do the job. Last but not least there is an EtronTech EJ198H driving two USB3.0 headers for up to four front USB3.0 connectors.		- Integrated audio - PCI Express Gen3 - 2D graphics chip integrated - Power design - Headers for up to four front USB3.0 - mini-SAS	- PCIe x4 @ Gen2 x2
Performance		+	-
Because this board is actually able to drive 128GB of memory at 1'600 MHz we wanted at first to show you the power of the ram caching under real world workloads. But unfortunately BAPCo SYSmark decided otherwise, the benchmarking suite being incompatible with ram caching. Therefore we changed our innitial plan and compared the performance of this workstation board with the performance of an high-end gaming motherboard. Nevertheless in this case we saw something interesting, this workstation board is actually faster than the highest-end gaming motherboard from the same manufacturer in almost all tests. We also ran a three days long extreme stability test on the 128 GB ECC memory working at 1'600 MHz (see screenshots page 6) to make dead sure the system is 140 %. Small wonder, the setup completed successfully HCI Memtest ten times.		- Performance
BIOS		+	-
The BIOS is of course well furnished for a workstation use, but that's it. 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 frequencies and memory timings for exemple.		- Lots of WorkSation/server settings	- Free of overclocking settings
Recommendation		+	-
Gigabyte managed to build a very strong and good looking workstation motherboard with its GA-6PXSV3.  They even managed to surprise us, when it comes to performance. This board is highly efficient and it suites you perfectly if you should be looking for a workstation motherboard that features an ATX formfactor and supports up to 128 Gigabyte of RAM.		- Worksation - Server - Ram Caching	- Overclocking - Gaming - Desktop
Rating
We give the Gigabyte GA-6PXSV3 4.5 out of 5 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