Gigabyte Announces Their New Flagship Motherboard: The X58A-UD9
by Ian Cutress on May 12, 2010 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Gigabyte are currently attacking the X58 market; with no less than 10 boards, from the budget EX58-UD3R (and it's upgrade, the X58A-UD3R) to the premium EX58-EXTREME, their latest board tacks on the moniker of the X58A-UD9.
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In terms of board features, you get support for 6-core Gulftown processors, 4 way SLI and Crossfire X across 7 PCI-E 2.0 slots using 2 NF200 chips (for x16, x8, x16, x8, x16, x8, x16 lanes), support for tri-channel DDR3-2200+ memory, onboard buttons for power, reset and clear CMOS, 2x Realtek Gigabit ethernet connectors, 2x SATA 6Gb/s connectors using the newest Marvell controller, and 2 USB3 connectors.
Unsurprisingly, Gigabyte are also marketing their own specific motherboard standards: DualBIOS, allowing for BIOS backup protection; Hybrid Silent-Pipe 2 design for heat conductance across the chipset and VRMs such that a fan is not needed (however connectors are provided for water cooling); and a hardware control IC for precision voltage control. Gigabyte’s penchant for high phase counts also rears its head in the form of a ’24 phase’ VRM (current handling capabilities are unknown to us at present). Also of note is the On/Off Charge support, allowing USB devices to be powered by certain USB ports when the motherboard is powered down - Gigabyte can utilise this by supplying 3x more power to these USB ports.
The board is obviously aimed at enthusiasts wanting to break overclocking records. There's no word on price, but it's most likely to be more expensive than the EX58-Extreme, which currently retails at a $349 minimum.
If this board comes our way, we'll let you know how it performs.
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HollyDOL - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
I was almost happy to see such a board to release, but later I have found out the board is so big it won't fit many computer chasis. With a new board it looks like a new chasis as well... And it's quite pity most of chasis manufacturers don't specify how much you can fit in except it fits "AT, ATX and mATX boards" :-/For me, if such a board missed floppy and IDE connector I'd be quite happy, but I would like some real network card (sorry, RealTek NIC is not). Other than that I still think I will be a buyer of this baby.
Marc B - Thursday, May 20, 2010 - link
I would like to see a detailed review of this board. I"ve been looking for an X58 board to used as an HD video server, with USB 3.0, and this one looks like it fits the bill. I need at least Q1 PCI-e X16, Q2 PCI-e X8, and Q1 PCI-e X4. This is one of the few boards that provides the slots at the required speeds, even compared to server grade Xeon boards, and even extra expansion beyond that. I just have to make sure this fits inside my hot swap case.Adjudicator - Saturday, May 22, 2010 - link
This mainboard seems to have almost everything. However, one question nagging in my mind is whether can this board support ECC RAM (When used with a Bloomfield / Gulftown Xeon).Considering that the X58 Tylersburg Chipset shares its roots with the Xeon 5500 / 5520 Tylersburg Chipset, I do know that ECC RAM can be properly supported if the mainboard and the processor can support it.
The few X58 mainboards that I know that officially support ECC are the ASUS / AsRock Workstation (WS), and the DFI LANPARTY UT X58-T3eH8.
According to Gigabyte's website, this board can only use Non-ECC modules, making it less useful for Workstation builds.