Gigabyte shows off X79 lineup at IDF 2011

Gigabyte has been showcasing its finished motherboards for the X79 LGA 2011 platform due out later this year. It will introduce three motherboards, the mid range UD5, a premium UD7 and the gamer orientated G1.Assassin 2. The Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 motherboard has support for two lots of quad channel memory as well as 3 way SLI and CrossFireX. The board supports up to a huge 64GB of quad channel memory and is the only one of the boards to feature 8 memory slots as the other boards sacrifice less DIMM slots for more of other features. 12 SATA ports (Six 6GB/s) and four USB 3.0 ports are provided. All three of the PCI-E lanes operate at 3.0 speeds when three way GPU configurations are enabled you will get 8X across all lanes (8X at PCI-E 3.0 is 16X at PCI-E 2.0). The CPU VRM is 14 phase.

The next board is the GA-X79-UD7 which is targeted at having more GPU support. There is support for 4-Way SLI/CrossFireX (8x/8x/8x/8x) on PCI-E 3.0 lanes, a large 22 phase VRM has been established for the CPU socket to support huge overclocks and the motherboard takes two 8pins, a 24 pin and two SATA power inputs to bring enough power to all the components. 14 SATA ports are provided although the balance between II and III hasn’t been determined yet. This board supports 32GB of Quad Channel memory unlike the UD5 which supports 64GB.

 The G1.Assassin 2 is much like the UD5 in its features except dual quad channel memory has been sacrificed for single quad channel memory to allow the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi hardware-accelerated audio processor (CA-20K2) and the Bigfoot Killer NIC PCI-Express hardware-accelerated network controller to be installed to give better gamer functionality. The three PCI-E 3.0 lanes support three way 8X SLI/CrossfireX otherwise single and dual configurations operate at 16X. You also get 12 SATA ports here of an undetermined nature.

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