Gigabyte GA-X58-USB3 Motherboard Review

Packaging
The X58-USB3 comes in a typical Gigabyte box with blue and white colouring and big, bright, bold pictures and logos. The first thing you’ll notice is that it screams out about the USB 3.0 features with on-board acceleration and how much faster USB 3.0 is. We’re also told that it has unlocked performance, has an on/off charge feature and that it has a 2x copper PCB for the technical nuts out there wanting to know how reliable this board is and what components it uses. Couple this with the Ultra Durable 3 features of Japanese solid capacitors, lower RDS(on) MOSFET’s and Ferrite core choke used, and I bet you’ll all drooling over your keyboard. For the novice users wondering what they hell I’m going on about, it means it uses the latest and great components to make the motherboard. It also has the usual logos to tell us about the CPU support and what chipset the board uses from Intel and down the bottom right, is where we’re told about the LGA 1366 socket support as well as the graphics card support, as this board supports ATI CrossFireX and is nVidia SLI ready.

The side of the box (as expected) is where we find a barcode sticker guiding us through the main features of the board. This includes the X58/ICH10R chipsets, that its socket 1366, has PCI-E 2.0 x16 capabilities, uses the ATX form factor, has 6 x DDR3 tri-channel support, 8-channel HD audio, Gigabit LAN, 6 x SATA 3GB/s ports and has the most important; 2 x USB 3.0 ports.

The back of the box is where it all delves into a little bit more detail explaining some of these newly heard of features. The on-board acceleration is given a run down and explains how much faster USB 3.0 is compared to the older USB 2.0 with clear improvements and also what Gigabyte 3x USB Power Boost technology is and with clear picture explanations, it should be easy for anyone to understand. Other features that the box explains through, is the ultra-durability of using the best components, how the board is ultra-power efficient through use of hardware and software design so that the whole of your system is optimized for the best performance whilst being the most efficient to its ability. We are also given a quick rundown on Ultra Smart 6, which in summary, is a software package to get the most out of your hardware, when it comes to faster booting, overclocking, recovery, BIOS features and much more.