Conclusion

The MW70-3S0 remains a solid board if you're considering building a 2P system based on a wide range of Intel Xeon E5 CPUs.

Gigabyte is aiming the MW70-3S0 towards business customers who want a no-frills motherboard able to support dual Xeons based on the Haswell architecture.

Simple to setup and sporting a clean layout, the MW70-3S0 performs a touch better than a rival Supermicro board when judged across a broad spectrum of CPU and graphics benchmarks.

The older nature of the chipset means that some newer technologies need to be added in through discrete controllers. Though value is the focus here, we'd encourage Gigabyte to include more USB 3.0/3.1 and possibly upgrade the audio to the levels usually seen in the consumer space.

The MW70-3S0 remains a solid board if you're considering building a 2P system based on a wide range of Intel Xeon E5 CPUs. Sensible layout provides the opportunity of using large heatsinks for top-notch cooling while storage is strong through a combination of SATA and SAS.

Expected to cost in the region of £400 when it goes on sale in the channel, Gigabyte's latest server/workstation board is a safe bet for a high-performance build.

The Good		The Bad
Good layout Top-notch performance Best-in-class memory support Solid focus on storage		More USB 3 would be nice Audio could be improved

Gigabyte MW70-3S0

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TBC.

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Yes, but will in run Crysis?

On a more serious note, how well to server platforms like this cope with gaming? tremendous over kill or surprisingly meh compared to products aimed at gaming? I'm simply curious, I've never really looked at this side of the market in any detail at all.

Also I do appreciate that this type of rig is aimed at completely different audiences and workloads..

Deleted
Yes, but will in run Crysis?

On a more serious note, how well to server platforms like this cope with gaming? tremendous over kill or surprisingly meh compared to products aimed at gaming? I'm simply curious, I've never really looked at this side of the market in any detail at all.

Also I do appreciate that this type of rig is aimed at completely different audiences and workloads..

Surprisingly meh actually, I mean for gaming you need about 4 cores and a lot of clockspeed, more cores doesn't give you a benefit usually and xeons tend to be lower speed to keep all the cores within power budget. With dual sockets performance can even be worse than with a single CPU as a task gets juggled between the CPUs. The motherboards generally aren't sli capable or if they are it's only between quadro cards which aren't good for gaming so get used to one GPU.

That said I was looking at the cost of a new skylake system recently and thought “hold on a minute, 260 or 290 GBP for an i7 quad core depending on whether I want to overclock, plus 100 pounds for the board… stuff this”.

Went on ebay, bought a pair of used e5-2670s for 280 pounds, 2.6-3.3GHz, 8 sandybridge cores each (16 physical total) plus hyperthreading and PCIE 3.0. Combine that with 64GB of RAM for 120 pounds, a used workstation motherboard for 150 and bam. It's not cheap but it's way better value in my opinion and at that clock speed will probably still hold up during games, probably more so than benchmarks show because benchmarks are run on clean installs but a regular user has backups, steam, skype, chrome running in the background. Those tasks can get a whole other CPU in this system.

Yup. You're much better off putting that money in to your graphics cards, rather than looking at a dual Xeon setup. Even an i7 doesn't offer much of an advantage, with games, compared with an i5.

When it comes to where you're money should go, it's GPU grunt over CPU grunt every time.

IF you are into gaming (any) i5 quad core at +3.0 GHZ is enough, 16GB RAM DDR4/DDR3 @ 1866MHZ is enough, a 512GB SSD Hard drive (Samsung 850) is enough…….what is not enough is the LED screen coz you seriously need 4K capable O-LED screen something like 42 inches (two of them), what is also not enough is the graphics card coz you need something like a GTX 980 Ti in SLI!! OR even TRIPLE SLI.

lol. “The audio could be improved”. Not really that important for a server or indeed a high-end workstation, where you would surely use a dedicated sound card? :p

Review: Gigabyte MW70-3S0

Conclusion

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