Gadgetory

okay so today I'm going to be having a look at the grand Papa of all of the gigabyte x58 motherboard so this is the brand-new x58 a UD 7 now it was originally going to be called the x58 u extreme - sorry not UD anything extreme - 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 X 58 and p55 boards and the biggest features that you're going to see all these boards are their three three three on board accelerators so that stands for USB 3.0 so that's a brand new USB standard that runs at five megabit gigabit per second sorry excuse me megabit okay there's a USB power times three 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 parts because of the way gigabyte has over built those ports very cool and we've also got Sega 3.0 which technically isn't say a three-point always say that six gaben per second rather than say the three gigabit 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 three eighths inch Barb's for water cooling there's a whole bunch of marking spiel in there 24 phase power that's another improvement they made over the s50 in extreme which was definitely an awesome x58 or it actually had one I used for quite a while before I replaced it for aesthetic reasons because although gigabyte makes awesome boards sometimes the look is not always what you're going for in a particular okay so let's get this board open here you comes in like a nice white box and then you can see that our okay first we have a plastic shell plastic shell comes ok plastic shell lock and then we have you know what let's do the accessories first okay accessory box so inside the accessory box I have you say the back panel I have molex to SATA adapter and I have an eSATA a couple eSATA cables okay that's kind of neat okay and then next I have four SATA cables and an IDE cable okay next I have the Dolby Digital home theater sticker awesome next I have a 3-way SLI bridge just in case we want to run 3-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 up with a crossfire bridge because crossfire already video cards it should come with the crossfire bridge okay then we've got a little gigabyte sticker did you gigabyte manual including the driver CD you don't use the driver CD download the latest drivers off the manufacturer website multilingual installation guidebook awesome and then you have their smart six users manual okay next thing we've got is the heatsink 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 on to the board right here and then mounts into a PCI slot so you can use all of this huge thin 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 da 1366 socket now this is a lote socket which seems to matter these days because there was an issue with some of the Foxconn 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 6 SATA 2 ports so SATA 3 gigabit per second and for say that 6 gigabit per second or SATA 3 ports now the original extreme Ward was supposed to include these but they ended up having to sub it for something else because the standard wasn't quite ready but now here they are and all of their glory and okay yeah we've got our 3 PCI Express 16x slots you know these are the right ones because these are the ones that are spaced for tri SLI ok 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 other ones are just color-coded for no particular reason you got 7.1 audio 2 Gigabit Ethernet so 6 USB 2.0 2 USB 3.0 a couple firewire ports clear CMOS button that is so handy then you've got a couple of digital audio and a 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 x58 a UD 7