[punx223]

Gigabyte EX58-UD5

Over the past few weeks I have had the great opportunity to work with the Gigabyte EX58-UD5.
Mind you this is my first major full time venture into the X58 1366 socket platform.



First of all a great amount of thanks to Gigabyte for the board to test with.
I have used many Gigabyte boards in the past, and if this board is nearly as easy to use or as easy to overclock as the previous, I do not see how all of the other motherboard manufacturers stay in business.

We start with an overlook of the entire board to see how well it is laid out, and any possible issues we may encounter. There were a few things I did notice with the layout. I see the chipset cooler appears to be very similar to the one I previously have seen on the EP45-UD3P, which shares not only its styling but hopefully its excellent cooling characteristics.

• Large heatpipe cooler
• Cooler very well laid out to allow fitment of most large aftermarket coolers without issue.
• Very low profile but efficient southbridge portion of cooler completely clears any large graphics cards.
• Inclusion of a 4x slot for usage of non graphics cards (graphics cards will not fit in slot as the leg going to the southbridge cooler would be in the way.)

• 10 total serial ata ports (6 “blue” controlled ICH10R southbridge, 4 “white” controlled by 2 different Jmicron controllers) for a very large amount of drive expandability.

• Onboard power and clear Cmos buttons for ease of use outside of the case.
• Onboard 2 digit post display to assist with potential no post condition diagnosis.
• 8 rear IO panel usb's plus 4 main available from the onboard headers
• 12 Phase CPU power for ultimate stability when pushing overclocks or heavily loaded situations.
• Onboard power phase, temperature, and overclock LED's give you a real time look into how your system is running.

That is just the start of the features that I love about this boards layout. There are also a few things that concern me about the layout and may be problematic to potential users.

Lowest Pci-e slot location: If running Tri SLI with dual slot cooled cards you would need a case with 8 expansion slots, whereas most cases have 7
X58 chipset only provides 32 Pci-e lanes, so tri sli setups will be 16x8x8x this is actually very common.
Onboard power phase status and overclock LED's can be quite bright, and if in a windowed case can be overpowering.

As you can see there are some things to look at when thinking of this board, but otherwise the board layout and coloring scheme is very well laid out and subtle enough. In a world where off the wall color schemes and UV reactive seems to be the norm. I found this board to be a peaceful break from that, as its styling to me was very nice subtle and yet functional.