A budget mobo for Core i7, from Gigabyte.
GIGABYTE is one of the biggest manufacturers of motherboards, so to ignore its products is a little silly. This one was sitting around the Labs for a while, and though we'll candidly admit that we hadn't got around to it yet that's simply because we'd looked at the top-end EX58-EXTREME board months back - and that was so good it got into our Kitlog - but had too many other boards to give this one some love. Well that love-in time is now, so we got all our tech and whacked it into this budget-skewed mobo to see if we got any love back.
This board is based around Intel's current premium X58 chipset, one that offers more PCIe 2.0 lanes than a Vomitron offers queasy stomachs at the local carnival. Throwing a heatsink on top of this, GIGABYTE hooked it up to the southbridge and power regulation with a nickel-plated heatpipe construct. We've found this to be the best method of aircooling a board, though obviously the more metal (specifically copper) used in construction the higher the capacity for lower temperatures. The cooling array is secured with screws to allow easy removal for those into watercooling, though the power regulation and such will still need some form of cooling.
There's plenty of room around the LGA1366 socket for big coolers, with a significant amount of ferrite chokes mixed with solid caps surrounding it. Six DDR3 slots are lined up in the usual top-right corner, but they're squeezed right near the CPU and might interfere with heatsinks. Also in the top-right is a hard power button, reset button, and more LEDs than your average Christmas tree. 24- and 8-pin power sockets are in the usual places, while eight right-angle SATA ports are lined up along the edge of the mobo. Two of these are coloured differently from the rest, and show that they're hooked up to the separate chip onboard (labelled as GIGABYTE SATA 2, but with a JMicron logo showing who actually makes it). RAID is definitely a possibility here.
Front panel headers and USB headers populate the bottom-right corner alongside a single IDE port, and two FireWire headers also lie along the bottom - concealed underneath grey plastic caps. A Floppy port rounds out the bottom of the board, while the audio header is in the usual annoying spot right behind the I/O ports. Expansion slots are pretty nicely laid out, though the bottom PCIe x16 slot only works as x8 electrical (physically limited in the slot itself). The top PCIe x4 slot is also limited by length - the chipset cooling has a screw in the way about a centimetre after the slot finishes, meaning that this is restricted to 1x or 4x devices only.
I/O ports at the back of the mobo include two PS/2, Optical/Coaxial, Firewire, Reset CMOS, eight USB, Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 channel audio. The latter is powered by a Realtek ALC889A chip, which is a relatively old chip (from circa 2007) but should still do a decent job of making noise come out (as always, a soundcard is the best option for great audio).
When we set to overclocking the board we found GIGABYTE's usual good BIOS, though USB keyboards are still off by default. We pushed the QPI all the way to 164MHz, which is nice. Flashing of the mobo was very easy thanks to the built-in updater and a simple USB stick, and the BIOS offered every option you'd expect. Amusingly it also warns you of any components you've overvolted when saving the settings, just to make it absolutely clear what you're doing (as if you didn't know). Overall this is a well-rounded board, with solid performance and a good price.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009