Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 LGA1366 Motherboard Review

A Closer Look at the X58A-UD7 pt.2

The X58A-UD7 is one of the few X58 motherboards with four physical PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots, however since it lacks a PCI-Express bridge chip like the NVIDIA NF200, all the slots do not run at x16 speeds. Instead, Gigabyte have relied on the little rectangular switches to split the 32 PCI-E 2.0 lanes to the four PCI-E x16 slots.

In a dual graphics card configuration, the first and third PCI-E x16 slots will operate at the full x16 speed (x16/x16). When three graphics cards are installed, the top x16 slot will be running at x16, while the third and fourth slots will operate at x8 (x16/x8/x8). If four graphics cards are installed, all four PCI-E x16 slots will operate at x8 (x8/x8/x8/x8). Officially, Gigabyte lists this motherboard as supporting up to 3-way CrossFireX and 3-way SLI, but you could indeed run Quad CrossFireX with four single-slot Radeon HD 3850 or HD 4850 graphics cards.

We are more than a little disappointed that the PCI-E layout doesn't allow for the use of four dual-slot graphics cards, especially since all that would have required is for the northbridge cooler to be downsized a bit.


The X58 IOH chipset has been outfitted with its own three phase power design (you can spot the third sealed ferrite choke between the two heatpipes), and the VTT MOSFETs have been given their own little heatsink.

Speaking of the northbridge, Gigabyte are still basically using the same "high-end" cooler that they unveiled with the EP45T-Extreme, and we aren't really a fan of it. Although it looks robust and it works acceptably at cooling the X58 chipset, it features a totally inept design. As you can see, the only thing connecting the bottom layer to the top layer are fins. Now fins are designed to dissipate heat, not transfer it. There is very little contact area between the two layers. This makes water cooling pointless, since very little of the heat load is actually being transfered to top layer. A better design would be to allow users to manually install the water block directly to the bottom layer, and to have a proper fin assembly for the majority who use air cooling.


When we said "proper fin assembly", we didn't really mean this. The Hybrid Silent-Pipe module might look impressive, but the amount of heat that gets transferred to it really isn't all that significant since the northbridge cooler itself is not really properly designed to transfer maximum towards the top layer that this huge heatsink module attaches to.


Starting clockwise from top-left, we have the ITE IT8720F chip is an I/O controller which is responsible for hardware monitoring along with fan speed management and it supplies the legacy floppy support and PS/2 ports. Next is one of the two Realtek 8111D Gigabit LAN PCI-Express controllers. The JMicron JMB362 supplies the two eSATA/USB Combo ports on the rear I/O panel. Last but certainly not least is the NEC D720200, which is a USB 3.0 controller that supplies the two USB 3.0 ports on the rear I/O panel.

Not pictured if the venerable Realtek ALC889A, an eight-channel High Definition audio codec.


On the rear I/O panel, there are the PS/2 ports, optical and coaxial S/PDIF connectors, clear CMOS button, two types of FireWire ports, two yellow USB 2.0 ports, two USB 2.0/eSATA Combo ports, two Gigabit LAN ports, two black USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, and the six audio jacks


On the back on the motherboard we can spot the large chrome black metal backplate behind the CPU socket area. This is a design feature specified by Intel to ensure that heavy cooling solutions would not bend and potentially damage the PCB or even the CPU socket itself.

As you can see, there are a number of naked MOSFET ICs on the back of the motherboard, supplying both the processor and the X58 chipset. While the IOH cooler is held in place with metal mounting bracket and screws, the southbridge and MOSFET coolers still utilize evil plastic push-pins.