Tom's Hardware > All Reviews > Components > Motherboards > X58 On A Budget: Seven Sub-$200 Core i7 Boards

X58 On A Budget: Seven Sub-$200 Core i7 Boards

07:20 - Wednesday 29 July 2009 by Thomas Soderstrom

10. Test Settings
11. Benchmark Results: Call Of Duty, Crysis
12. Benchmark Results: Far Cry 2, World In Conflict
13. Benchmark Results: Audio/Video Encoding
14. Benchmark Results: Productivity
15. Benchmark Results: Synthetic
16. Power, Heat, And Efficiency
17. Overclocking
18. Conclusion

Sometimes it pays to be patient. When Intel’s high-end Core i7 processors burst onto the scene last fall, motherboards that supported them were both expensive and relatively less mature than they are today. As a consequence of the top-down approach many vendors used in introducing X58, shipping their most-expensive products first, buyers willing to sacrifice a few features will sometimes find that the newest mainstream parts are less troublesome than high-end predecessors.

We saw this type of maturation between last winter’s $300+ X58 motherboard roundup and this spring’s $200-300 follow up, and we expected further progress in small items such as BIOS implementation for today’s planned sub-$200 comparison. But something happened to alter our plan: prices slowly crept back up.

Extended stability tests for overclocking lead to weeks of testing in a seven-motherboard roundup, but prices don’t stop fluctuating during that time. Recent increases in the price of several models would have excluded two of today’s products from a sub-$200 roundup had those increases occurred before testing began. One company had even given us a choice between two models, and the board we chose went over the limit while the other did not. Forced to add a caveat to our “sub-$200” title, we’ve kept an eagle’s eye on value in these sensibly-priced parts.