Gigabyte Intel Core ATX Motherboard GA-X58A-UD7 Review

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(More customer reviews)Here is a "flagship" motherboard from Gigabyte that promises the world and leaves you hanging. It all sounds amazingly good on paper but absolutely fails to deliver in practice. Anyone who did a quick research about this board can easily spot widespread memory issues. This board is very finicky about what memory is used. In my case it didn't even like the one I picked from vendor's approved module list (Patriot Viper Triple channel 2000mhz 6 gig kit). Although explicitly stating it supported DDR3 2100+ speeds, people including myself had problems getting past the stock 1066Mhz setting. Having said that it is a colossal shortcoming for an overclocker's board. Turning to Gigabyte tech support for resolving this issue was in no way shape or form helpful. Let's just say that Gigabyte Tech Support was a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic. Bios flash after bios flash and various settings, I came to the sad realization that, at least in my case, it was a no go for fast settings. Overclocking capabilities are good, but no cigar yet for this board. Good overclocking yields is expected from a board of this price segment. Things start to look even worse when compared to EVGA's X58 boards. The chipset cooling attachment is big and intimidating, and quite pretty to look at. At first glance, it arouses a certain level of curiosity and excitement. Once again, in typical fashion of this board, the big bad mean NB cooler falls short also. In fact, under stock settings at full load it is very hot. You can crack a few eggs on it.

So what is good with this board? Let's see... The layout is good, although if you incorporate the NB cooler, it becomes very cramped in that section. X58-UD7 incorporates 24 phase power, USB 3.0 and Sata 3 as well as added copper which Gigabyte claims will result in a cooler running board, less energy waste, and a more stable board which yields better overclocking return.

I feel that this is a half baked product rushed to the market to claim "we did it 1st!." Obviously they are the 1st manufacturer to roll out a product with USB 3.0 and SATA 3 support. However, USB 3.0 and SATA 3 are not a part of an official AMD or INTEL controller yet. Which means it is a 3rd party controller that is slapped on the PCIe bus. Bad news is, the more PCIe bus gets populated the less available bandwidth to each device. That is true for your killer fast graphics card also. There are few articles on hardware enthusiast websites, which show that SATA 3 is essentially does not make any difference when compared to sata 2. However, with the advent of insanely fast SSDs this is sure to change. SSDs with their mind blowing speed will be required to saturate that kind of bandwidth. Until then, it only seems wise to wait until INTEL and AMD decide to incorporate USB 3.0 and SATA 3 into one of their upcoming chipsets. Hopefully by then SSD prices will soften a little more.

Coming back to our review at hand here... This board is way too expensive to have all these issues and especially for a "flagship" hardware, I cannot help but have a bitter smile on my face. Because it is not worthy of that many dollars and that title. If you are hellbent on buying this board because it looks good on paper feel free to do so. And those who are looking for a great built with rock solid stability need to look elsewhere.

Feel free to comment, I would like to see what others thought about this review and the board.

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Product Description:
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 Intel Core i7/ LGA1366/ Intel X58/ 6DDR3-2200/ 3-Way ATI CrossFireX?/NVIDIA SLI/ 2GbE/ Raid/ 7.1-CH ATX Motherboard

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