Gigabyte Ex58 Extreme Motherboard

ComputerTV Alright, you're looking at a hot one. The Gigabyte GA-EX58- Extreme Motherboard for the core I7s. Finally an exciting product. I'm very excited to have my hands on this one. This is a very cool board. When you think about overclocking and world records and extreme systems, you think of a couple of brands, and on top of that list is definitely Gigabyte. They design some of the most extreme boards and for the most demanding enthusiasts. This board is actually not for everybody. If you're not really, really, really really into overclocking, you are not going to need this board, Gigabyte does make some lower end models. But if you are one of those guys, one of those ridiculous, ridiculous people that just loves to overclock everything, and needs those BIOSs that have support for ridiculous frequencies and ridiculous voltages because you are going to be using LM2, or you're gonna set up your cascade on here, even a big water cooling loop, this has a lot of great features that you're going to like. A bunch. The Hybrid Pipe 2 design is fantastic. The actual cooling on this board is one of the nicest I've ever seen. I don't know if you can kind of come in over here. Right, look at that heat. That heat pipe right there. It's hard to see it in real life. I mean, on video. You gotta see it in real life. It is amazing. The design through here is all internal, of course. It is liquid cooling as well as air cooling, and if you wanna add more cooling, they even give you this. Check it out. This is a huge cooler for your northbridge. For air cooling. If you do wanna air cool, you can use this. It'll take up one of the slots. The only bad part is that it will kill your PCI Express X1 slot that's right over here. But pretty much, it's just gonna fit just like that, and go right out the back of your computer. It's gonna take up one of the expansion ports and you're gonna kill your PCI Express X4 slot, but you may maintain PCI Express X1 on the other side. You might lose both. Either way, you don't have to use it. It's only if you're not going to be using liquid. But, you can use liquid and this in combination to keep your north bridge extremely cool. It's a very cool feature. Also, the board itself, Ultra Durable 2, that's... Actually, Ultra Durable 3. I forgot this is X58. Their PCB is like, high-end. I mean, seriously, it's very thick, very strong, it has 2 ounces of copper in there for the ground and power layers. 2 ounces of copper, that's double what they've done before. That's gonna increase your overclocking by reducing temperatures, by giving you a more stable voltage. Also the impotence, impedance, I'm sorry, on the board, on the PCB is going to dropped by 50%, ah yes, impotence is bad. Impedance is even worse, especially when you're overclocking. Boy, semantics and terminology, I'm just not good at it. What else do you get? You get dual BIOS chips for when you go way too far. So, if you need that you have two BIOS chips, I don't know if you can see them, right there. There's two of them right there just sitting there. If you go too far you gotta back up. You get very fine voltage controls. And the BIOS, excellent, excellent BIOS on this board. Very, very small steppings. The smallest .002. Extremely low steppings, so you can get very precise on your overclock. You get amazing hardware that I'm killing over. You also get that amazing hardware, sorry, back to the amazing hardware. You get Ferrite Core chokes, you get Lower RDS(on) MOSFETs. Japanese made capacitors, that are all solid state. Everything is really, really nice on the board. All the cooling, pretty much all the stuff that you can physically see and touch on the board is exceptional. It looks really, really good. Dual Gigabit LAN. Tons of PCI Express 2.0 slots for SLI or Crossfire. northbridge cooling and southbridge cooling with water. Or you can use the Hybrid pipe system. Hybrid Silent-Pipe 2 is what they call it. So, very, very impressive. Now, this is obviously a Core i7 board. So the 920s, 940s, 965s, 4.6 and 6.4 giga transfers per second. The Core i7 has really been a huge step up for everybody as far as processors go, and platforms go. Triple channel memory support, doubles the bandwidth of double channel memory. So, 50% more, you know, it's a big deal. Also, the QPI is replacing the front side bus. That's a huge deal too. That's literally twice as much bandwith between the chipset and the processor as a 1600 Mhz front side bus, which is the fastest that was available in the Core 2 line. It was a very expensive $1,500 processor. It was the QX18770. Imagine that. It's twice as fast bandwith between the northbridge and the CPU, and now you don't have to transfer as much information anyway because the memory controller is built into the chip. Into the chip. Just like an AMD has it on the actual die of the processor, it's the same thing with Core i7. So, it will support up to 24 GB. 24 GB of DDR3 triple channel memory. It'll do 800, 1066, 1333, 1600, 1800, and 2100 and up, you know, with overclocking. Again, 1.65 volts is kinda where you wanna max out your Vdim. But, many, many people are going way, way, way above that without too many detrimental affects. Supposedly, it's something more of a long term. So, we'll be testing that long term to see if it does detriment the lifespan of your processor, your motherboard, or your memory, running anything above 1.65, like 1.7 or 1.8. Some people are getting some really, really nice performance from their memory in tripple channel configurations. They're getting great scores and on their memory benchmarks and it really does bring a lot to the table, a lot quicker response from everything. Now, another thing you're gonna notice that has changed, either comparing it to other ultra high-end boards, is there is no discreet audio. But you actually have excellent, excellent 7.1 channel HD audio through here. 106 decibel signal to noise ratio. So, that's actually completely comparable to discreet audio. You actually might wanna think twice about getting a discreet audio and spending your money elsewhere because this audio is really that good. Another thing you're gonna notice is that you get a lot of USB connectivity. Look at this over here, you get 4 USB 2.0s right here, and you get another 4 here. So, that's 8 on the back panel alone. Plus another 2 headers on the inside is another 4, for a total of 12 USB 2.0 connections. Above, obviously again, is the dual gigabit LAN, your HD audio, and if you move right there, that's a nice little overclocking feature. Your clear CMOS button in case you overclock too far you can go ahead and reset your BIOS to the original settings and that'll let you start from scratch and reboot your system. Just be careful. The placement of this is a little bit scary if you're gonna go to plug in a USB 2.0, you might, you know, push the button and accidentally kill your overclock that you worked so hard to get perfect and super efficient and minimized your voltages and you tightened your latencies, and everything is trim and proper, and it's quick to ruin so be very careful. But, it's still an excellent, excellent tool for overclocking and I'd rather it be there than not be there. You also get a Firewire out here. You have an additional 2, an additional 2 that are available via a header on the inside, and they also give you a back panel connector that I'll show you now. You have S/PDIF in both the optical digital and the analogue coaxial right there. And then you have the PS2s for your legacy keyboard and mouse. Speaking of legacy. If you wanna know, does this have an IDE connector? It does not. Actually, I'm sorry. It does. Poop. There's one there. And there's a floppy. Completely pointless. Whatever. I guess they like it. And you know what's here? Here's another thing I liked about this board. Just like all the other high premium boards for X58, they have a nice back panel cooler which is going to keep everything cool and as well as gives you a little more torque for tightening down your CPU cooler. Make sure there's no flex in your board, or putting undo stress on the board. It's not necessary. You can just have one of these plates on the back and that's gonna help out a lot. This thing is... This thing is awesome. I love this motherboard. Let me show you what's in the box. Let's see here. Stuff you're never gonna use. Actually, you know what? This is pretty cool. Let me show you this because this is... I found this to be very, very interesting. Okay, so everyone knows that eSATA is awesome. eSATA gives you 3 Ghz per second external hardrives and stuff like that. But, what if you have a hardrive but it's not an enclosure and you don't want to open your case and plug it into a SATA port, and run the wires, you might have cable management all nice. You could kinda want to have like one of those docking stations, but you don't want to pay for it. This is a really cool thing that Gigabyte has given you. This is a 4 pin molex connector and they give you this bracket on the back. Look at this bracket, this is really cool. You get this bracket and it has a 4 pin molex connector right there that you connect on the inside of the case. And then from there you can plug this right here and this will go to a SATA power connector. So outside of the case you can power up a SATA drive, and then you get this really cool SATA to eSATA cable. So, it's not really an eSATA. On one end is eSATA and on the other end is just regular SATA. So, this will go into the hardrive and this will go into the eSATA port right there. And that lets you pretty much hook up an old SATA drive that you might not really wanna install. You might wanna get some stuff off of it, or make an emergency backup to send somewhere else, in case there's a fire at your house. Whatever reason, but it's actually quite useful, so that's an interesting thing they give you in the box. You also get really cool orange cables. Awesome Gigabyte, very nice. Some 90 degrees, some of the regular ones. You have two and two, so that's very, very nice that they included them. And it's cool that they're orange. I think that's a cool color. You get your, this is IDE or floppy? This is IDE cable. So, in case you're old school you'll wanna have one of those around. You get that included in the box. You also get a very nice input/output shield. Nicely painted and labeled, which is also always very nice. Floppy cable, and also, very nice. You get your SLI, triple SLI bracket. And you get your Crossfire. So, very nice to have both of these included in the box. All of this is great, great stuff. This is an excellent, excellent motherboard. Now, the only thing I'll tell you is that I don't really recommend it for the novice overclocker. The BIOS is insanely detailed, insanely complicated. You have all these features that you can tweak. And if you just wanna get high end performance you're gonna do a 4 Ghz overclock. You don't need to get the Extreme X58. You can get an X58 that's not Extreme. They have the DU6. This is top notch stuff, this is for the really high end guys. So, again, the X58 extreme, it's actually the GAEX58 Extreme from Gigabyte, insane motherboard. Go out and buy it if you're hardcore. If you have any questions on it Email me, I'll see you guys next time. For more information on the Gigabyte GAEX58 Extreme Motherboard for Core i7 processors, type in: G452-2718 into the search engines of any of these major retailers. for ComputerTV, I'm Albert. (C) 2008 SYX Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved Channel: TigerDirectBlog