[punx223]

Gigabyte EX58-UD5

Over the past few weeks I have had the great opportunity to work with the Gigabyte EX58-UD5.
Mind you this is my first major full time venture into the X58 1366 socket platform.



First of all a great amount of thanks to Gigabyte for the board to test with.
I have used many Gigabyte boards in the past, and if this board is nearly as easy to use or as easy to overclock as the previous, I do not see how all of the other motherboard manufacturers stay in business.

We start with an overlook of the entire board to see how well it is laid out, and any possible issues we may encounter. There were a few things I did notice with the layout. I see the chipset cooler appears to be very similar to the one I previously have seen on the EP45-UD3P, which shares not only its styling but hopefully its excellent cooling characteristics.

• Large heatpipe cooler
• Cooler very well laid out to allow fitment of most large aftermarket coolers without issue.
• Very low profile but efficient southbridge portion of cooler completely clears any large graphics cards.
• Inclusion of a 4x slot for usage of non graphics cards (graphics cards will not fit in slot as the leg going to the southbridge cooler would be in the way.)

• 10 total serial ata ports (6 “blue” controlled ICH10R southbridge, 4 “white” controlled by 2 different Jmicron controllers) for a very large amount of drive expandability.

• Onboard power and clear Cmos buttons for ease of use outside of the case.
• Onboard 2 digit post display to assist with potential no post condition diagnosis.
• 8 rear IO panel usb's plus 4 main available from the onboard headers
• 12 Phase CPU power for ultimate stability when pushing overclocks or heavily loaded situations.
• Onboard power phase, temperature, and overclock LED's give you a real time look into how your system is running.

That is just the start of the features that I love about this boards layout. There are also a few things that concern me about the layout and may be problematic to potential users.

Lowest Pci-e slot location: If running Tri SLI with dual slot cooled cards you would need a case with 8 expansion slots, whereas most cases have 7
X58 chipset only provides 32 Pci-e lanes, so tri sli setups will be 16x8x8x this is actually very common.
Onboard power phase status and overclock LED's can be quite bright, and if in a windowed case can be overpowering.

As you can see there are some things to look at when thinking of this board, but otherwise the board layout and coloring scheme is very well laid out and subtle enough. In a world where off the wall color schemes and UV reactive seems to be the norm. I found this board to be a peaceful break from that, as its styling to me was very nice subtle and yet functional.

[punx223]

Installation

Installation turned out to be as easy as any motherboard I have ever done. It carries the standard ATX layout and all connections for the most part are located at the immediate edges of the board to allow for easy routing and cable management. You will find that the IO shield does have covers over the Network ports that do need to be bent back, be sure to do so as that would be quite troublesome to do once the board is completely installed.

When testing a few cases for installation I did notice that the screw midway down the board below the sata ports can be difficult to get to, otherwise it installed with the greatest of ease (unlike compared to a few other boards I have tested recently.)

The board actually has both keyboard and mouse PS2 ports. Something that is starting to disappear in a lot of boards these days, but a welcome addition for any legacy user that is ready to upgrade systems but loves they're old keyboard.


Bundled Accessories

access

with the board comes a very complete accessories selection.

• SLI connectors (both a flexibual dual SLI and a rigid 3 way SLI)
• Sata cables (a total of 4 yellow cables with right angle plugs on one end)
• Floppy and IDE cables
• Esata bracket with included power cable and esata cable
• Full Motherboard manual including motherboard driver/software cd
• Multi language manual
• IO shield

[punx223]

Bios Layout

The bios is pretty much a standard Award bios, with the addition of the first menu “MIT” or “Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker”

This section is very intuitive and very easy to use for the overclocking of pretty much every component of the system. I found this area very easy to use, and very easy to learn compared to many boards out there.



The bios offers full ability to overclock the system, and also offers the CIA which is basically a small safe overclock the board will do for you automatically without having to be too deep into settings (definitely a major plus for any novice overclocker)



I did find that there were a few settings that seemed odd. For instance the QPI link speed slow mode was extremely too slow whereas the slowest realistic speed can be a bit too high at certain high Bclk situations.



Also under advanced clock controls you have your drive settings along with skews, and the pci-e freq and the CIA feature I mentioned earlier




The memory timings are well laid out and very nice to be able to setup each channel individually.



Voltages are well laid out as well, but I have found that this board does very well with auto voltages especially fro moderate or 24/7 overclocks.

[punx223]

Test setup

Motherboard: Gigabyte X58-UD5
CPU: Core I7 920 D0 stepping
Memory: Kingston DDR3 2000 Mhz Cas8 3x1gb
Hdd: Patriot SSD 32gb Qty2 in raid level 0
Graphics card: Gigabyte GTX 260 Super overclock
CPU cooling: Promiliatech Megahalems with Skythe ultra kaze 3000RPM fan
PSU: Corsair HX 1000



Getting started overclocking

First things first I decided to test with each of the auto overclocks to see how the board worked, and as expected it definitely pulled off the overclocks and without a hitch. They were very simple overclocks but then again its a free eprformance boost and gives you a decided jump over the stock performance for no extra charge.

Next I decided to see how the board scaled when just trying to clock it myself. So I started by leaving everything on auto and upping the Bclk directly through Bios.

I was very surprised as the board went to 200 Bclk with everything on auto with the exception of setting up the ram correctly. Not only did the board start but ran almost completely stable Passed Linx testing 4 out of 5 passes.

That speaks extremely well for the board as it can automatically set these settings and get the board to such a level of stability with basically no user intervention. With a little voltage tweaking I was able to get the board running 24/7 stable at 4 ghz 200x20 stable with a ram speed of 1600 mhz CAS7 which returned very remarkable results.


One strange thing I did run into is that the board occasionally would have a strange post cycling and list a failed overclock once posted on a 24/7 stable overclock.

[punx223]

Benchmark testing

This is to show how the system fares in common benchmarks

To start off with we run them at stock


Wprime is basically a multithreaded number crunching bench... it gives us a chance to test all 8 threads of the CPU

Stock:



and here is the overclocked run of teh exact same test




You will notice how large of a difference that made. So imagine how much difference it would make when encoding a video or any other normal app you would be using.


Now on to 3dmark vantage

Here is a stock single card run.




and here is the overclocked single card run.




here you will notice not a huge increase as only the cpu score went up, but the graphics score is largely unaffected. Lets see if teh bottleneck is teh single card?

Here is a run in SLI.



There we have it, this processor/motherboard combo is very efficient, so taht leads to teh graphics cards being a huge bottleneck, and adding the secong card increased teh score amazingly.

[punx223]

Gaming overclock testing

These tests are to show how well the board scales in real life gaming situations. Both single GPU and SLI

The games used are Crysis and Cryostasis. Both games are fairly newer with very heavy graphics engines.

First up is cryostasis single card:



Next up is cryostasis SLI




As you can see the cards one again scale beautifully together and make for a very good performance and framerate jump


Next up is CRYSIS! it is very system intensive and still very hard to get playable framerates depending on your setup.

Here is the single card run:



not bad consiering taht is just a single super overlocked 260

But heres with 2 cards in SLI:





As you see the games scaled very well in SLI. But one thing to note, on games so graphically demanding I saw almost no increase not even 1 FPS difference between 2.66ghz stock CPU and 4ghz overclocked CPU. So once again this CPU/motherboard combo apparently work very efficiently together, and quickly rendered the single GPU as a bottleneck.

[punx223]

EASYTUNE

For anyone not aware, many motherboard manufacturers have been bundling software utilities that not only monitor health of the hardware but now also assist with some level of software overclocking past whats available in the bios.

The software included by Gigabyte is labeled “EASYTUNE” and its represents exactly what the tool does, Makes it very easy to tune and monitor your system from one easy hassle free utility.

The program has many features, including:

• Temperature, voltage, and fan speed monitoring
• Graphics card monitoring
• Memory settings and memory SPD information
• Cpu information, along with motherboard details.
• A full overclocking section with frequency and voltage settings for most setting, not only that but most can be changed actively without ever leaving the OS.

Here are some included screenshots of the overclocking features to help see what features are offered by this utility

[punx223]

Gigabyte Super Overclocked GTX260



You will notice I am running one of the newest GTX 260 cards from Gigabytes lineup.

The card I am using is model no. GV-N26SO-896I

Much like its motherboards It offers the 2oz copper PCB amongst other key features that make it what it is.



Some of the main key features are:

• 2oz Copper PCB
• Top tier Samsung and Hynix memory
• Fully solid state capacitors
• Hand picked, Binned top of the line GPU's

What all of this means to you is you have the best components built by some of the best technicians to ensure you not only get a card that meets the top specs but also will last you a long time and at a clock speed far over other offerings on the market.

These cards are actually the top picked cards that hold the highest clocks of each batch, they must pass what they call the “GPU Gauntlet” in order to ensure it would be a top performer when it reaches you.



Overclocking:

I was able to on the stock cooler get the card to a astounding 724 mhz core clock and it did complete a run of 3dmark 06 but it was quite unstable, the fact that such a high clocked card to start with clocked even that much further speaks volumes to Gigabyte's stringent, and very effective method of binning their cards appropriately. I would say such speeds such as those that were obtained should be reserved for benchmarking purposes only, and keep it more conservative when gaming.



Temps:

Even when pushed very hard I found that the GPU and pcb temps were a very respectable temperature and a bit below what I have seen on other cards. I decided to take a look under the cooler and found that even with an application of a aftermarket thermal material it did little to help the temps as apparently thermal control was a top priority when building this card, as I saw a difference of approximately less than 1C

Aesthetic appeal:

The cards look very nice, as they have a all black theme with just the words “SUPER OVER CLOCKED” across the front in a almost flaming text. I believe it will make a very good looking card in any system be it a case modders or an extreme gamer.



Outputs:

This card is very unique as it offers a DVI, VGA, and a native HDMI hookup, But do not dispair as they have you covered if you use dual DVI displays. It comes with a HDMI to DVI converter.



If you do happen to use hdmi, they also do include the SPDif cable to help pass sound through the card and to your HDMI displays speakers.

You will notice that they only include one molex to PCI-e adapter, I believe that is stricktly for the fact that most power supplies strong enough to push this card has at least one 6 pin pci-e plug, and if your running one that does not have one at least, it probably does not have enough amps to power the card to begin with.

[punx223]

Conclusion and final thoughts

The board was very impressive, and I must say it did live up to the expectations I have for a Gigabyte board. Not only did it live up to those but it smashed through them, and set a new record for me as for the ease of overclock and ease of usability.

Aside from the issue with tri SLI needing 8 expansion slots, the board is amazing and very powerful. Anyone looking to build a great gaming rig that also has all of the power features to allow for lower heat dissipation but also a much nicer power bill when doing standard desktop tasks, this would be an excellent choice for you.


Pros:

• Excellent bios.
• Great chipset cooling
• Lots of onboard options
• Excellent board layout

Cons:

• Needs 8 expansion slots in case to run Tri SLI
• occasional strange post cycle on cold boot on a 24/7 stable overclock.

[Buckeye]

Very nicely done Shannon

Those graphics cards are pretty sweet and SLI is pretty darn good. Overall thats a killer setup

Did you get any DICE or Phase runs with that ?