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By Trace at 2010-10-30 11:56
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The latest arrival from Gigabyte is a GA-X58A-UD5 1366 motherboard. Gigabyte has long been known for their 2 ounce of copper per board promise. Lately, Gigabyte's boards have been breaking Futuremark Vantage records. So what does this board hold in store for a Core-i7 980x? Read on to find out just how well this performs.
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Introduction and Overview:
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5
In the lab today, we have the second best board that Gigabyte makes: the GA-X58A-UD5. The only thing that separates this beast from the very best is one fewer PCI-Express x16 slot. Considering that most GPUs are dual-slot coolers these days, I think I can do without that extra slot, since I already can only use 2-3 of the slots available on this board.
This board has several notable features which make it very future-proof, meaning you shouldn't have to update it for a long time to come. These features include: SATA 6GB/s, USB 3, and dual Gigabit LANs. All of these features will make sure that it stays part of the test system here at TBCS.
Let's take a look at the unboxing and the board.
Man, that is one good looking box. Sparkles!
Gigabyte has some nice packaging. The box that you see above is just a wrapper around a plain-white box. I also have a Gigabyte 6870 sitting next to me, and it has beautiful packaging as well.
Good contents, wish it had blue sata cables...
Here we see the board for the first time. It's unfortunate that it comes with orange sata cables when the whole board color scheme is blue. For future releases I would love to see blue sata cables substituted for these orange ones.
And now, a closer look at the board and some of its features:
Integrated power switch for bench stations
A plethora of I/O connections for the back panel including 8 USB ports, two of which are USB 3.0 and two more that are eSATA / USB 2.0 Combos. Dual Gigabit LAN ports, and both a full sized and mini 1394 ports. The coolest feature though is the Clear CMOS button right on the back panel. This makes those overclocking sessions much less painful because you do not have to open the side door.
Enough PCI-e Slots for quad-SLI or quad-Crossfire.
A Heat pipe connected network of passive coolers for the voltage regulators.
Enough DIMM slots for 6 sticks of 240 pin DDR3.
HOLY MOLY! 10 Sata ports! 4 of which are Sata 6GB/s
Continue reading the review, where we cover all of its features, have benchmarks, and give you the thumbnail summary.
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