Gigabyte X58A-UD7 Core i7 X58 SLI Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
1,084 words · ~5 min read
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okay so today I'm going to be having a look at the Grand Papa of all of the
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Gigabyte x58 motherboards this is the brand new x58a ud7 now it was originally
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going to be called The x58 U Extreme 2
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sorry not UD anything Extreme 2 when they were first talking about this
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product but since then they've actually changed the naming scheme a little bit
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they've done away with the extreme boards and they've gone with an a now a
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denotes their new updated x50 and p55
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boards and the biggest features that you're going to see on these boards are
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their 333 onboard accelerator so that stands for USB 3.0 so that's a brand new
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USB standard that runs at 5 megabit
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gigabit per second sorry excuse me megabit okay there's USB power time 3
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now what that means is that your USB ports on this board are all running at
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three times the power spec that USB
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actually calls for so that means that if you're running a hub like an unpowered
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Hub you can actually run three full powered devices off that hub using just
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one of these ports because of the way Gigabyte has overbuilt those ports very
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cool and we've also got SATA 3.0 which technically isn't SATA 3.0 it's SATA 6
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gbit per second rather than SATA 3 gbit per second so there's a little bit of
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confusion there but you get the point also a three-year warranty it's SLI
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ready Crossfire ready it's ready for pretty much everything so this board
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comes with everything except the kitchen sink in fact you could even argue the
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water cooling integrated on it could be sort of like a kitchen sink so it comes
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with 38 in barbs for water cooling there's a whole bunch of marketing Spiel
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in there 24 phase power that's another Improvement they've made over the x58
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extreme which was definitely an awesome
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x58 board I actually had one I used for quite a while before I replaced it for
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aesthetic reasons because although Gigabyte makes awesome board sometimes
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the look is not always what you're going for in a particular build Okay so let's
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get this board open here it comes in like a nice white box and then you can
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see that our okay first we have a
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plastic shell so plastic shell comes
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off okay plastic shell off and then we
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have you know what let's do the accessories first okay accessory box so
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inside the accessory box I have an eeta
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back panel I have a Molex to EA adapter
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and I have an SATA a couple e SATA cables okay that's kind of neat okay and
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then next I have four SATA cables and an IDE cable okay next I have a Dolby
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Digital home theater sticker awesome next I have a three-way SLI Bridge just
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in case you want to run three-way SLI on this board IO
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Shield this I don't know what it is but
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it has holes for ventilation and it seems to be some kind of
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brace so yeah then we have a regular SLI
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bridge now remember this is a crossfire ready board and it doesn't come with a
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crossfire Bridge because Crossfire ready video cards should come with the
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crossfire Bridge Okay then we've got a little Gigabyte
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sticker Gigabyte manual including the driver CD don't use the driver CD
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download the latest drivers off the manufacturer website multilingual
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installation guide book awesome and then you have their smart 6 users manual okay
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next thing we've got is the heat sink that goes at the what I'm not even going
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to take this thing out you basically shouldn't be using this thing it's like
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totally Overkill but I guess if you're buying the extreme board you might as
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well so it's a heat pipe cooler that actually straps onto the board right
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here and then mounts into a PCI slot so you can use all of this huge fin array
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for cooling the the chipset and the mosfets and the chips down here so now
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let's get to the board itself so wow
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that's a heavy board as with all x58 boards you have support for triple
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Channel memory so this particular board supports up to 24 gigs of triple Channel
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memory you can see all around here is all of our 24 phases of power for your
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LGA 1366 socket now this is a Lo's
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socket which seems to matter these days because there was an issue with some of
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the foxcon sockets a little while back all right so we've got our power
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connectors in their usual places 8 pin up here 24 pin down here now this is
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where it starts to get interesting here on the side we have
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have six SATA 2 ports so SATA 3 gbit per
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second and four SATA 6 gbit per second
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or SATA three ports now the original extreme board was supposed to include
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these but they ended up having to sub it for something else cuz the standard
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wasn't quite ready but now here they are in all of their glory and H here we go
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where's more stuff okay yeah we've got our three PCI Express 16x slots you know
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these are the right ones because these are the ones that are spaced for tri SLI
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okay so that means you still got access to a couple PCI Express 1X slots up here
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at the top now over here is the back
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panel now the blue ones those are your
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USB 3.0 ports as far as I know the
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yellow ones are just colorcoded for no particular reason you got 7.1 audio 2 GB
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Ethernet so 6 USB 2.0 2 USB 3.0 a couple
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fire wire ports clear seos button that is so handy then you've got a couple of
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digital audio and couple PS2 ports
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there's the back of the board nothing exceptional there I love to see metal
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braces for anything from the front of the board because it means that they're
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not cheaping out using plastic thank you for checking out my unboxing of the x58a
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ud7