Gigabyte EX Extreme 2 or Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7

[Judge-dredd]

hi all what you think about the New Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7
has anyone got this board for a review yet

• Huge cooling system, near enough spanning across the entire board, with a waterblock over the X58 chip.
• 4 PCI-Express x16 graphics slots supporting Crossfire or SLI
• 4 internal SATA3 6.0Gb/s ports
• 2 USB 3.0 ports supported via NEC controller
• Triple power USB (1500mA to each port instead of 500mA on USB2, 2700mA to each USB 3 port compared to 900mA in the specification.)

This board will also feature in Gigabyte’s ‘333’ promotion, as it features USB 3.0, triple power USB, and SATA 3.0 connectivity.

As it isn’t released yet, Gigabyte have yet to put what will become their flagship board on the site yet. Rest assured though when they do launch, you’ll know about it

pic below

[Psycho101]

Re: Gigabyte EX Extreme 2 or Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7

Doesn't seem like a "rush out and buy it" product IMO.

For a start, the extra power to the USB ports seems pretty useless. If 900ma is all that's in the official USB3 specs then that's all any device will draw. they won't produce devices that need to draw more if Gigabyte are the only company doing this.

SATA 6G functionality is only as good as the controller it uses, and as of yet there's only one commonly available drive that uses a 6Gb/s interface. It's expensive and only shows performance gains on cached reads/writes to and from the interface. Traditional HDD's really don't need SATA 6G. It will be useful for the next generation of SSD's though.

The SATA 6G ports probably don't support RAID either. This is the big advantage over RAID with an Intel ICH10R and with a SATA 6G chip. SATA 6G chips have much faster I/O processors and as suc can cope with more devices in a RAID0 config. The ICH10R has a bandwidth cap at about 650MB/s, ie any more than little over 3 250MB/s SSD's and you hit the max the chip can cope with, regardless of the intrface speed (SATA I.1.5 or SATA II). A RAIDable SATA 6G would no doubt have an easier time coping with monster throughput. Sounds like alot of I/O, but this is supposed to be an "Extreme" board.

The specs also state 4 16X PCIE. Sure they may be 16X length but can they all use 16 lanes when all 4 are engaged? Maybe, but the specs you post don't make that clear. From the spacing of the slots it'd be very sifficult to use 4 GPU's at once. the spacing between the slots isn't big enough to accomodate anything more than single slot coolers for slot 1, 2 and 3 (Assuming all three are to be filled). The PCIe 1x slots also seem to be blocked/restricted by the X58 heatsink.

Most serious watercoolers will use their own block for the X58, which will undoubtedly be superior to the included one.

A great board if you're wanting the Extreme end of the market and upgrading from another platform, but not worth upgrading to from an existing X58. Just buy a SATA 6g and USB 3.0 expansion card instead.

[Judge-dredd]

Re: Gigabyte EX Extreme 2 or Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7

i agree to a point
as for 4 PCIE only way for it to work is watercooled cards
as for seta 6g most hard drives cant keep up now as it is
i have 6 drives in a raid 0 now

i would hope a more fine tuned bios & better internet adaptor as the realtech is not all that great

[Psycho101]

Re: Gigabyte EX Extreme 2 or Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7

6 traditional HDD's is no sweat for the ICH10R. As soon as 4 or more Indilinx/Intel based drives are hooked up, you reach the ~650MB/s limit of the ICH. The SATA 6G controller would solve this, even with only connecting SATA 3Gbps drives as there is significantly more I/O processing power on a SATA 6G IC. Some planned cards featuring SATA 6G will be using a 2000MHz Intel I/O RAID processor for example.

Taking a closer look at the 4 PCIE slots it's clear from the picture that slots 1 and 3 actually contain pins the full length of the slot, pertaining to 16X lanes, where as slots 2 and 4 only have pins going half way, pertaining to 8X lanes. Not much of an issue though. 8 lanes is fine for any single GPU card.

Never really had any issues with my Realtek NIC but I'm sure there are much more capable NIC's out there. Depends on ones needs I suppose.

[Judge-dredd]

Re: Gigabyte EX Extreme 2 or Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7

my nic times out the blue circle is there then the yellow trangle the red then its back to mormal
but ig you download game patches it a real pain

i have been thinking of adding a intell adapter in the bottom PCIE slot see it that fixes it

it might be windows drivers for now i dont no just looking for a quick fix
the nic is my only problem everything else run smooth had it to 4.2 for a few hours

F9D bios read wrong temp for cpu 11c i wish that was true
F9H locks mulupler at 15 can i can not change it to 24 its defult setting

[Psycho101]

Re: Gigabyte EX Extreme 2 or Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7

I've had similar issues in the past with both this board and my previous (MSI NForce 4) doing the same thing, connection dropping etc. Turns out that it was in fact my cable modem.

About 6 months ago all Virgin Media customers, including me, got a free modem upgrade to make 50Mb/s broadband a reality. With my old modem, anything using bittorrent (I play WoW and all updates are bit torrented for example) would cause the connection to drop. This no longer happens with the new modem. It's fantastic. I used to dread a 200MB+ patch, but now it doesn't bother me.