okay so today I'm going to be having a look at the Grand Papa of all of the
Gigabyte x58 motherboards this is the brand new x58a ud7 now it was originally
going to be called The x58 U Extreme 2
sorry not UD anything Extreme 2 when they were first talking about this
product but since then they've actually changed the naming scheme a little bit
they've done away with the extreme boards and they've gone with an a now a
denotes their new updated x50 and p55
boards and the biggest features that you're going to see on these boards are
their 333 onboard accelerator so that stands for USB 3.0 so that's a brand new
USB standard that runs at 5 megabit
gigabit per second sorry excuse me megabit okay there's USB power time 3
now what that means is that your USB ports on this board are all running at
three times the power spec that USB
actually calls for so that means that if you're running a hub like an unpowered
Hub you can actually run three full powered devices off that hub using just
one of these ports because of the way Gigabyte has overbuilt those ports very
cool and we've also got SATA 3.0 which technically isn't SATA 3.0 it's SATA 6
gbit per second rather than SATA 3 gbit per second so there's a little bit of
confusion there but you get the point also a three-year warranty it's SLI
ready Crossfire ready it's ready for pretty much everything so this board
comes with everything except the kitchen sink in fact you could even argue the
water cooling integrated on it could be sort of like a kitchen sink so it comes
with 38 in barbs for water cooling there's a whole bunch of marketing Spiel
in there 24 phase power that's another Improvement they've made over the x58
extreme which was definitely an awesome
x58 board I actually had one I used for quite a while before I replaced it for
aesthetic reasons because although Gigabyte makes awesome board sometimes
the look is not always what you're going for in a particular build Okay so let's
get this board open here it comes in like a nice white box and then you can
see that our okay first we have a
plastic shell so plastic shell comes
off okay plastic shell off and then we
have you know what let's do the accessories first okay accessory box so
inside the accessory box I have an eeta
back panel I have a Molex to EA adapter
and I have an SATA a couple e SATA cables okay that's kind of neat okay and
then next I have four SATA cables and an IDE cable okay next I have a Dolby
Digital home theater sticker awesome next I have a three-way SLI Bridge just
in case you want to run three-way SLI on this board IO
Shield this I don't know what it is but
it has holes for ventilation and it seems to be some kind of
brace so yeah then we have a regular SLI
bridge now remember this is a crossfire ready board and it doesn't come with a
crossfire Bridge because Crossfire ready video cards should come with the
crossfire Bridge Okay then we've got a little Gigabyte
sticker Gigabyte manual including the driver CD don't use the driver CD
download the latest drivers off the manufacturer website multilingual
installation guide book awesome and then you have their smart 6 users manual okay
next thing we've got is the heat sink that goes at the what I'm not even going
to take this thing out you basically shouldn't be using this thing it's like
totally Overkill but I guess if you're buying the extreme board you might as
well so it's a heat pipe cooler that actually straps onto the board right
here and then mounts into a PCI slot so you can use all of this huge fin array
for cooling the the chipset and the mosfets and the chips down here so now
let's get to the board itself so wow
that's a heavy board as with all x58 boards you have support for triple
Channel memory so this particular board supports up to 24 gigs of triple Channel
memory you can see all around here is all of our 24 phases of power for your
LGA 1366 socket now this is a Lo's
socket which seems to matter these days because there was an issue with some of
the foxcon sockets a little while back all right so we've got our power
connectors in their usual places 8 pin up here 24 pin down here now this is
where it starts to get interesting here on the side we have
have six SATA 2 ports so SATA 3 gbit per
second and four SATA 6 gbit per second
or SATA three ports now the original extreme board was supposed to include
these but they ended up having to sub it for something else cuz the standard
wasn't quite ready but now here they are in all of their glory and H here we go
where's more stuff okay yeah we've got our three PCI Express 16x slots you know
these are the right ones because these are the ones that are spaced for tri SLI
okay so that means you still got access to a couple PCI Express 1X slots up here
at the top now over here is the back
panel now the blue ones those are your
USB 3.0 ports as far as I know the
yellow ones are just colorcoded for no particular reason you got 7.1 audio 2 GB
Ethernet so 6 USB 2.0 2 USB 3.0 a couple
fire wire ports clear seos button that is so handy then you've got a couple of
digital audio and couple PS2 ports
there's the back of the board nothing exceptional there I love to see metal
braces for anything from the front of the board because it means that they're
not cheaping out using plastic thank you for checking out my unboxing of the x58a
ud7