Gigabyte GA-X58-USB3 Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts
The whole point of this review was to show that there is still life in the X58 chipset and socket 1366 in general and we believe that we clearly showed that. A lot of consumers are moving over to Sandybridge as they feel that 1366 is dying, but we’ve shown that it is still a big hit, especially in terms of rendering and overclocking whilst keeping stability in mind.

The board has a lot of features in terms of catering for the most graphics intensive applications and includes support for Nvidia SLI and CrossFireX technology depending on what your preference is. The whole point behind the name of this board insists that it has USB 3.0 and whilst it does, we don’t really feel that two ports entitles it to be named after the fast functionality of USB 3.0. Instead it should have been called the X58-USB2.5 just to give clarification on the matter.

Benchmarks saw some fantastic results and the overclocking isn’t something to be grumbled at. Also looking at the potential of how far the overclocking can go on a simple air solution, we feel that the i7 950 and all chips in the socket 1366 range still haven’t had their true power unleashed and this is something we hope to be able to do when we get our hands on a X58-OC motherboard that Gigabyte have released recently, but time will tell.

If you’re after a top spec board and want all of the functionality that we see from recent products without the need for upgrading your processor, then we’d recommend this board to you, but still feel that the name is a bit misleading to say the least.
Pros:

• Fantastic overclocking potential
• Great stability
• USB 3.0
• Plenty of expansion slots
• SLI support
• CrossFireX support
• Accepts fast memory
• Accepts dual and tri channel memory
  

Cons:

• Name suggests more USB 3.0 ports would be present
• Colour scheme is not to everybody’s taste
• No SATA 6GB/s
  

We would like to thank Gigabyte for supplying this sample
You can purchase this item from Scan