Gigabyte needs little introduction as it is well known as one of the largest motherboard manufacturers in the world. While not always a personal favorite, Gigabyte is well known for making solid, feature rich motherboards. Typically they are just as stable as anything I’ve seen from ASUS, EVGA, or MSI. Gigabyte’s board’s layout and feature set are usually on par and sometimes exceeds the feature sets offered by their competitors.

What’s interesting about the X58A-UD9 motherboard is that it is by far the most expensive motherboard we have ever seen. At publication time the board is retailing for a whopping $699.99. None of the EVGA X58 3X SLI, or 4X SLI Classified boards are that expensive.

Even EVGA’s SR-2 isn’t that expensive and that’s a dual processor enthusiast solution. The cost of the X58A-UD9 exceeds the cost of most workstation motherboards and I find myself asking, the question: “Why?” While there has always been hardware out there that wasn’t for the masses and always cost more than the average hardware, the fact remains that the X58A-UD9 is considerably more expensive than their competitions highest end offerings.

It forces me to ask the questions: Why? Who does Gigabyte intend to sell this board to? and What can this board offer that a $450 board cannot? Unfortunately we may never fully understand Gigabyte’s motives for creating such an expensive motherboard but we can at least figure out if the thing offers anything that “cheaper” boards in the $400-$500 price range cannot.

The Gigabyte X58A-UD9 Gigabyte X58A-UD9 is based on Intel’s X58 chipset and ICH10R south bridge. The board implements a redesigned 24 phase power design which Gigabyte calls “Unlocked Power” using low RDS(on) MOSFETs and low core energy loss ferrite chokes. Like Gigabyte’s other Ultra Durable 3 motherboards, the X58A-UD9 features 2oz. of copper in the motherboard PCB for both power and ground layers.

Additionally the board features all high quality solid-electrolytic Japanese manufactured capacitors. According to Gigabyte’s literature the board was designed with 6 core CPUs in mind.

The board also features a slightly different approach to phase power switching or load balancing. It is capable of running on 2, 4, 6, 8, 12 or 24 power phases.

It also can run 12 phases together, and switch to the other 12 phases periodically to “double the life span.” Gigabyte also claims that in the event of a single phase failure, that group of phases will be shut off and thus ignored allowing the board to continue to function. That of course reduces your 24 phase board down to a 12 phase solution but I can appreciate the wisdom of such built in redundancy.

The list of features continues of course with two important standouts. USB 3.0 and SATA 6G support. The board features 2 USB 3.0 ports and 2 SATA 6G ports. These are of course emerging technologies which will become more important as time goes on. The X58A-UD9 supports all multi-GPU CrossFireX and multi-GPU SLI configurations thanks to having two nForce 200 MCP’s to provide the PCI-Express lanes needed to handle its 7 PCI-Express slots.

Of course the Intel X58 chipset is limited to 36 PCI-Express lanes. Though the nForce 200 MCP’s do provide more PCI-Express lanes, the interface with the chipset is limited. So there is a choke point between the nForce MCPs and the X58 chipset itself. In reality this isn’t a problem because most if not all devices fail to totally saturate PCI-Express 2.0 x8 slots, much less x16 slots.

As a result performance degradation which might occur from “multiplexing” the PCI-Express lanes are mitigated. Indeed we’ve seen before how the nForce 200 MCPs either do nothing for performance or hurt it slightly.

The board also features IEEE1394 support, There are eight SATA 3G ports and two eSATA 3G ports. That’s right, you can connect up to 12 SATA devices to the X58A-UD9 if you count the SATA 6G ports in the total.

So far that’s the most built in SATA ports I’ve ever seen on any motherboard. The board also has dual Gigabit Ethernet support and 7.1 channel audio support. The board has a lot of features and integrated components packed in so you need very little to complete the system. An LGA1366 CPU, DDR3 RAM, drives, power supply and a video card are all that you need to create a functional machine out of this thing.

Packaging

The box for this thing is simply huge. Of course the board is actually an XL-ATX form factor board which of course means that the smaller boxes we are used to will not contain the X58A-UD9. The outer box is actually quite flimsy which is pretty much standard fare these days. There are two inner boxes each of which is made of corrugated cardboard and contains the board and included accessories. The included bundle is complete with few standout items.

Among the items that standout is the Hybrid Silent Pipe 2 module which attaches to the chipset cooling solution. We’ve seen very similar hardware from Gigabyte before. Essentially this thing takes up a ton of room but it creates unparalleled chipset cooling compared to other heat pipe and passive solutions in my experience.

Bundled accessories include: User’s Manual, Installation Guidebook, VIP card, driver disk, SATA 3G cables, SATA 6G cables, IDE cable, USB / eSATA accessory bracket, 2 Crossfire bridges, SLI bridge, 3-Way SLI bridge, 4-Way SLI bridge, thermal compound, 4 machine screws, plastic standoffs, I/O Shield, Hybrid Silent Pipe 2 module add on for the chipset,

Board Layout

The layout of the X58A-UD9 is pretty good but not perfect. Frankly I’m a little disappointed in some aspects of the layout. At this price point the board should be as close to perfection as is technically possible. The main thing that stood out for me was the relatively poor placement of the IDE port.

If I had my way the white SATA ports next to the 24 pin motherboard power and the IDE port would be swapped thus grouping all of the SATA ports together. I think that would make for a cleaner look and nicer cabling in most situations. I don’t even think the IDE port should be on this board but that’s another topic of discussion entirely. The next issues with regard to the layout are not readily apparent until you attach the Hybrid Silent Pipe 2 to the chipset.

The CPU socket is clear of obstructions and should allow the installation of most CPU coolers and water blocks. I was able to fit a Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme without issues. There really isn’t anything to complain about in regard to this area of the motherboard.

The X58A-UD9 features six color coded DIMM slots supporting single, dual, and triple channel memory technologies and features support for a total memory capacity of 24GB.

The memory slots are located far enough away from the expansion slot area and CPU socket to prevent interference with the installation of larger CPU coolers and video cards. Right next to the six DIMM slots is an onboard power button and reset button.

The heat sink for the north bridge is cooled using a large heat sink which Gigabyte calls the Hybrid Silent Pipe 2. Essentially it is a combination heat pipe based heat sink and water block. The thing is massive and it does take up an expansion card slot. Once installed two glaring faults pop up immediately.

The first of which is the fact that while installed, the 4 pin Molex connector above the first PCI-Express slot is no longer usable at all. Gigabyte missed the boat on this one by a wide margin.

No amount of filing or massaging things will correct for this design. So if you find yourself in need of this power connector, the use of that chipset cooling add on will be impossible. This design queue does however point to this motherboard being designed for the more “extreme” enthusiast that would be caught dead air cooling his north bridge!

The next issue does however stem from the chipset’s water cooling feature. The barbs are 1/4 in size which is fine I suppose but I’d have preferred 3/8″ or 1/2″ fittings myself.

Going beyond that there isn’t room for the 1/4″ barbs that are there now. Once you attach the tubing you quickly run into space issues with the chipset cooler add on. It’s somewhat workable but you have to be careful what kind of clamps you use on the fittings and you need to be mindful of their orientation during installation.

Angled fittings or a slightly different configuration of the chipset cooler could have resolved this issue before release. On most boards minor issues like this are tolerable and aren’t deal breakers. Now I’m not saying these should be deal breakers here either, but frankly on a $700 board a motherboard this type of issue shouldn’t exist.

The south bridge and both nForce 200 MCPs are semi-passively cooled by a flat metal heat sink which is connected to the rest of the board’s cooling system. It is a heat pipe based heat sink but no water from the north bridge flows to it in the event you use the water cooling feature. It sports a giant “9″ on it and is hard to miss.

Its flat and does a good job of cooling. The low profile nature of the heat sink ensures that it doesn’t interfere with the installation of graphics cards. In front of the heat sink are ten of the board’s twelve SATA ports. The other two are actually eSATA ports on the I/O panel. There is also an EIDE port directly in front of the heat sink as well.

The expansion slot area is nearly perfect and the XL-ATX form factor is what I’ve felt multi-GPU/multi-graphics card users have needed for several years now. It pleases me that Gigabyte left this area of the board legacy free. There are no PCI slots which frankly would go to waste on a board like this anyway. Each of the slots has a PCI-Express x16 form factor but given a limitation of PCI-Express lanes the board features a 16×16x16×16x8×8x8 lane configuration starting from the slot closest to the north bridge.

While I’m not seriously pleased by the last slot being so close to the outer edge of the board few people will be using four cards and as a result this won’t be a problem most of the time.

If you do in fact use four air cooled dual slot graphics cards than your chassis must allow for the last card to hang off the edge of the board. Gigabyte did give some thought to this as well since the 12v 4-pin Molex connector is angled so as not to interfere with the installation of that last card.

Also the nearly useless floppy drive port is down there as well. It might cause a problem but no one using all seven slots for video cards is likely to care as just about anyone using this will most likely be using Windows Vista or Windows 7.

The I/O panel of the X58A-UD9 is chalk full of ports. From left to right we have two PS/2 ports, optical out, SPDIF out, clear CMOS switch, IEEE1394, USB 1.1/2.0, combination USB 1.1/2.2/eSATA, mini-IEEE1394, USB 1.1/2.0, combination USB 1.1/2.2/eSATA, RJ-45, two USB 1.1/2.0 ports, another RJ-45 port, two USB 3.0 ports and six mini-stereo jacks for connecting your audio to the board. Gigabyte couldn’t have squeezed a whole lot more on the standard sized I/O panel.

Easy Tuner 6

Gigabyte has been packaging Easy Tuner 6 with their boards for over a year now. Not much has really changed since I first began to see this utility.

The program actually defaults to the “Tuner” tab. Though for the sake of organization I’m just going to start with the CPU tab. At first glance it looks quite a bit like CPU-Z. It gives you pretty much the same exact information that program would. The main difference is that this program shows you the motherboard model and BIOS version information on the CPU screen. The memory tab is also very much like that of CPU-Z. Like the CPU tab this tab is purely informational only.

The tuner tab is where you will find the first actual adjustable settings. The quick boost mode gives you up to 3 preset profiles to use. The whole thing resembles a stop light. With 1, 2, and 3 corresponding to green, yellow and red. Like buying salsa you’ll find that green is much more mild than red. This is mostly true here though even the red preset isn’t all that extreme. Essentially the most the red profile will give you is 3.33GHz. An easy task for most if not all Core i7 920 CPUs.

At the top of this there are three smaller tabs with modes for this tab. The first is “quick boost” followed by “easy” and “Advance.” Easy corresponds to the default tuner menu while easy and advanced bring up additional tabs within the same tuner tab. Frequency, ratio, voltages I, and voltages II. Both “Easy” and “Advance” are pretty much the same.

The “advance” tab gives you a few more settings in the form of sliders. On the voltages tab easy mode doesn’t give you many adjustments while “advance” lets you adjust all of them pretty much as you please. The voltages II tab doesn’t actually have but a single setting, the ICH Core voltage setting.

The graphics tab shows you your GPU and memory speeds and allows for adjustment of those values. This is a nice little inclusion but it isn’t terribly robust. The Smart tab has settings for the motherboard fan settings. This is little more than fan threshold settings so that you can set fan speed throttling. The last section is the “HW Monitor” which I’m going to go out on a limb and guess means “Hardware Monitor.” This essentially lets you set up audible alerts for thermal events, power events, or drops in fan speed. You can set the polling interval and use custom sound files for your alerts.

The utility is robust enough for the novice and I am not sure that it adds any real value to the hardcore enthusiast which is really who this board is going to appeal to. That said I’ve seen far worse and far more bloated applications included with motherboards over the years. As far as this goes, Gigabyte could have done much worse. With that said if this were my board, I probably wouldn’t bother with installation of this software.

BIOS

The Gigabyte X58A-UD9 uses the Award Incorporated BIOS. Also known as Phoenix-Award, though this is an Award style BIOS rather than the Phoenix type we sometimes see on other boards. Version F3 was used for all screen captures and testing.

The BIOS for the X58A-UD9 is pretty much the same Award BIOS we’ve been seeing since the mid 1990’s. Of course like any board, this version has been altered specifically for the hardware in question. At first glance this version of the BIOS is very similar to that of every board we’ve looked at in the last year or so from them. This isn’t a bad thing as the M.I.T. menu is much more organized than similar sections found on boards by other manufacturers.

The M.I.T. menu is broken up into further sub-categories in a sensible manner which makes navigating the BIOS to find the settings you need fairly easy and straight forward.

On the main M.I.T. menu you’ll find the BIOS version, current BCLK, CPU and memory frequencies. The total memory size installed, CPU temperature, VCore and DRAM voltages.

These aren’t adjustable settings, but are rather here for reference. The categories displayed are M.I.T. Current Status, Advanced Frequency Settings, Advanced Memory Settings, Advanced Voltage Settings, and Miscellaneous Settings. The M.I.T. Current Status doesn’t really have any settings either. It just displays more verbose information similar to what you would see in CPU-Z with the addition of CPU core temperatures.

The Advanced Frequency Settings section contains the CPU clock, CPU core features, Uncore settings, QPI settings, BCLK settings, XMP settings, and more. Essentially this is your one stop shop for frequency and CPU feature adjustment. The Advanced CPU Core Features are actually a submenu leading to just that. You can disable Execute Disable, EIST, C1E support etc.

The Advanced Memory Settings menu has your XMP memory settings, SPD control, Performance Enhancement settings, channel interleaving and several additional submenus for configuring the timings for each module and bank of modules. Next are the Advanced Voltage Settings. Load Line Calibration, CPU VCore, QPI/VTT voltages, CPU PLL voltage, PCI-Express voltages and more are all displayed and are adjustable here. The Miscellaneous Settings contain only two actual settings. Isochronous Support and Virtulization Technology support. The last setting puzzles me as it should be lumped in with the CPU features. After all that’s precisely what that setting is, a CPU feature.

The Standard CMOS Features menu contains drive configuration data, time and date settings, and floppy drive settings. At the bottom of the menu is some basic information concerning the installed memory and CPU clock speed. Advanced BIOS features contains the hard disk boot priority, boot ordering, HDD S.M.A.R.T. settings, No-Execute Memory Protection, full screen logo display etc. Integrated peripherals contains all the settings for your integrated hardware. The X58A-UD9 actually has more integrated hardware than just about any board I can recall at the moment. So this section contains a ton of settings. You have USB 1.1/2.2support, USB 3.0 support, Firewire settings, and settings for all the different drive controllers.

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There are also SMART LAN submenus which are similar to ASUS’ Ai Net 2 feature. Essentially this is built in for network cable testing. Finally we come to what is probably among the most important sections of the integrated peripherals menu and that’s the SATA 6G controller submenu. Enter this and you actually go into the Marvell 9128 RAID controller’s BIOS. It’s pretty basic but this is how you configure your SATA devices for this controller. I found this particularly tricky as I discovered that the wrong setting in here can cause you quite a few headaches.

You have to ensure that the mode for this controller is setup right in addition to setting everything up in here. Worse yet is that if there is anything on the drive such as RAID volume information for another controller, you will not see your drives in Windows. I had to actually plug my drives into another controller and delete their RAID volume data, MBR data etc. before I could get devices to work in Windows. This isn’t a big deal but it is something to be aware of. The Power Management Setup contains general advanced power management and APIC settings. HPET support is toggled on or off here as is ErP support. Next is PC Health Status which is generally self-explanatory. It displays open case warning settings, voltages and current temperature readings as well as allowing for you to set thermal thresholds for fans. An alert can also be configured for your CPU temperature.

Subsystem Testing

NOTE: For all Subsystem Testing, an Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition (3.33GHz) and 2GBx3 Corsair Dominator GT (2000MHz DDR3 7-6-7-20-1T @1.65v) memory modules running at DDR3 1333MHz were used. The CPU was cooled with a home brew water cooling setup consisting of a Swiftech MCR320 triple radiator, 3×120mm fans, Swiftech MCP655-B pump, and a Swiftech Apogee GTZ water block with LGA1366 mounting hardware.

Sound Hardware

The Gigabyte X58A-UD9 uses Realtek’s ALC889 7.1 channel audio solution. The manufacturer claims support for Dolby® Home Theater and doesn’t get any more specific than that. This solution is in use on a number of boards right now and thus its comparable to what the competition is using. Actually its really pretty much the same thing they use.

Audio – Subjective Listening

For subjective listening you want to listen to something that covers a range of sound types. For this portion of the review I went with Disturbed, Indestructible.

CD audio was perfect as expected. There was no distortion, hissing, popping, or any other audible oddities during playback.

Audio – Microphone Port Testing

The onboard audio MIC-IN port was tested using a Logitech Internet Chat Headset. Spoken words were recorded from the Windows Sound Recorder found under the Accessories\Entertainment folder in the start menu within Windows XP. The recording was made with the Microphone Boost option disabled, then enabled. The Microphone Boost option is found within the advanced menu under the microphone section with in the Volume Control Menu.

The recording sample was audible with both the microphone boost option enabled, and disabled, but while it was disabled, there was some distortion present. Actually there was distortion present while the microphone boost option was enabled, just a lot less.

Drive Performance

To test the capabilities of the on board USB 2.0 connections, we used an ACOMDATA HD060U2FE-72-USB 2.0/FireWire HDD connected first to the USB port. SATA drive tests were performed using Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX hard drives on all SATA headers. The SATA drives were used for testing in RAID 0 16k block size configurations on all applicable controllers. Testing was also conducted using the same model SATA drives in a stand-alone SATA configuration on all applicable controllers. All drive benchmarks were done using the open source Iometer program.

There really is no contest here. The fastest drive configuration we tested was the SATA 6G RAID 0 configuration. The Marvell 9128 supports SATA 6G and the other ports don’t. As a result the advantage was clear. So far this is really the only SATA 6G solution I’ve worked with. Other motherboards with Intel chips are essentially using the same type of solution. As a result it will be interesting to see how SATA 6G solutions integrated into the chipset actually perform whenever that happens.

Network Utilization Tests

Hagel Technologies’ DU Meter software was used with Windows Task Manager to determine the performance levels of the onboard network interface. DU Meter was used to measure bandwidth and transfer speeds, while Windows Task Manager monitored CPU utilization on the test system. For the testing, a 750MB Archive file consisting of several compressed WMA/MP3 files was used for the large file transfer, and 750MB worth of MP3/WMA files were used ranging in sizes from 3 to 30MB was used for the small files transfer test. The test was performed using a plenum rated category 5e crossover cable to bypass any traffic, routing or other transfer issues and possible packet loss or corruption that can be caused by a router/switch or hub. The cables were connected between two test machines, one using the onboard NIC(s) of the board being reviewed and the other is an Intel EXPI9400PT 10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet adapter installed into a test machine using an Intel D5400XS motherboard.

The Gigabyte X58A-UD9 features two Realtek 8111E PCI-Express network interfaces. Each is capable of 10/100/1000Base T operation and feature adapter teaming.

LAN1

The small files download test reached a peak transfer rate of 67.73MB a second. The average transfer rate for this test was 52.68MB per second while CPU usage was a very reasonable 4%. The small files upload test showed slightly better results with a much higher peak transfer rate of 94.17MB a second while the average fell quite a bit to 44.74MB a second. CPU usage increased slightly to 5% during this test.

The large files download test showed better results than that of the small files test. The maximum transfer rate reached 70.42MB a second while the average transfer rate was only slightly slower at 60.18MB a second. So there wasn’t much of a drop between the maximum and the average. The CPU usage was similar to the previous tests reaching a minimal 4%. The large files upload test mirrored the small files upload test with a peak throughput of 94.48Mb a second but only dropped to 65.07MB a second for the average transfer rate. CPU usage was a very reasonable 5%.

LAN2

The small files download test showed a max transfer rate of 70.56MB a second with an average of 57.02MB a second. CPU usage for this test reached 6%. The small files upload test showed a peak transfer rate of 88.69MB a second while the average reached only about half that or 46.43MB a second to be more precise. CPU usage was again 6%.

The large files download test reached a maximum transfer speed of 79.14Mb a second with an impressive average of 72.57MB a second. The CPU usage in this test was a mere 5%. Finally the large files upload test reached a peak of 93.40MB per second with an average of 72.67MB a second. CPU usage climbed slightly to 6%. all in all the network solutions are some of the better ones I’ve seen integrated into a motherboard. I’m still not a huge fan of Realtek adapters, but it’s nice to see them at their best here.
Multimedia Benchmarks

Outside of gaming and encoding, there are few applications on the desktop that will push our systems to their limits. Especially when we start talking about dual core processors that are becoming the norm now days. Some encoding apps are really starting to shine and become usable by the masses.

The benchmarks below all represent very real world situations just like you would run into at home while encoding video from your camcorder – or while using a picture editing program – or while encoding music for your iPod – or making movies with something as simple as Windows Movie Maker – or encoding a DVD for saving it to your hard drive to allow you easier access to the content.

We have simply timed our various tests on the different systems and supplied you with the amount of time it took for the system to fully build the file. Scratch disks were used properly as well as making sure we were not bumping into any IO bottlenecks elsewhere.

For whatever reason the X58A-UD9 falls behind the other Intel boxes. I am unsure why this is the case. We did run this benchmark multiple times and got the same results every time. Both the top two systems shown on our graph are using a 980X processor. No amount of attention to the result could ever unearth the “issue.” Never did we see another application point to a problem though.

The X58A-UD9 turns in some excellent results here.

WinRAR seems to favor the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 if only slightly. We were wondering if we would see this application lag given the large file writes, thinking that may have been the issue with our DivX results, but that was not the case.

Here we see odd results out of the Gigabyte X58A-UD9. I am uncertain as to the exact cause of the issue but the test results were erratic. Here again we see a video conversion test “lag” like our DivX tests, but UNLIKE our TMPGEnc tests. This left us scratching our head.

Gaming Benchmarks

As always, these benchmarks in no way represent real-world gameplay. They are all run at very low resolutions to try our best to remove the video card as a bottleneck. I will not hesitate to say that anyone spouting these types of framerate measurements as a true measuring tool in today’s climate is not servicing your needs or telling you the real truth.

The gaming tests below have been put together to focus on the processor power exhibited by each system. All the tests below consist of custom time demos built with stressing the CPU in mind. So much specialized coding comes into the programming now days we suggest that looking at gaming performance by using real-world gameplay is the only sure way to know what you are going to get with a specific game. Our CPUs & Real-World Gameplay Scaling would be a great place to start.

Overclocking

To say that the X58A-UD9 was among the most challenging boards to overclock would be an understatement. Let me just start off saying this board is not for the casual overclocker. Most boards you can leave on automatic settings and get decent results these days. Most boards you can take to around 185MHz BCLK before you start having to dial things in manually and on most boards you don’t need to mess with but about 4 or 5 settings in order to dial in the performance.

The X58A-UD9 is nothing like that. You essentially have to study each setting, what effect it has on stability and performance, then repeat for each setting. Then you need to study combinations of settings in order to finish the job. In my experience with this board you simply cannot achieve a decent overclock in a short amount of time. That’s somewhat of a shame as I came away from this experience feeling I needed a lot more hands on time with the board to milk it of its true potential.

It isn’t as if the X58A-UD9 has more settings than other boards because it doesn’t. Like other super high end boards this one requires very fine adjustments. With this board I was able to dial in a 180MHz BCLK before having to start dialing in the settings. I spent hours just figuring out what impact each setting had on the board’s performance. Just when you thought it was stable, it would crash to the desktop or randomly reboot.

I found myself timing the system’s uptime with each and every settings change looking for additional stability. Even worse is that the board often seemed inconsistent between runs. Very inconsistent. I’d adjust a setting, run the stability test and the system would hard-lock or reboot on me.

At that point I’d go into the BIOS, set the system back to the previous settings and then reboot. Once it would get into Windows my plan would be to go back and start tweaking again. Except for much of the time the system wouldn’t make it back into Windows or it would hard-lock or reboot on me the second I did. I’d make changes in the BIOS and sometimes I’d have to shut the system down and let it do a cold boot again before it would actually work with those settings. Again sometimes settings I thought worked that did pass stability testing would only do so once.

The board will complete POST and even get into the Windows desktop with a BCLK of 220MHz or in some random cases upwards of 230MHz BCLK. Unfortunately its either a case of the board teasing me or a matter of needing a lot more time to dial in the specific settings required to stabilize the overclock.

I’ve heard that the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 is very well liked for use with liquid nitrogen cooling. Indeed I’ve found evidence to support this online but from what I could tell very few of them broke 200MHz BCLK while doing so. I can’t say I find that encouraging but the clock speeds I’ve seen go well above 5.5GHz using an Extreme Edition CPU. Again I don’t think I’ve tapped the board’s full potential but in the short time I’ve had it I learned that its picky about settings.

Voltage is pretty much the name of the game. On default settings you can go to 220MHz FSB so long as you keep your CPU multipliers down low enough to avoid breaking about 3.6GHz. The board seems to prefer tweaks to the CPU PLL voltage, CPU / VTT voltage, I0H voltage, and ICH voltage.

These settings didn’t always require much in the way of voltage increases. Often the smallest increment the board would allow for was enough for results in either direction. Now I’m not certain of the cause but in regard to memory with the Core i7 965 Extreme Edition CPU I could never hit the memory’s maximum rated speed of DDR3 2000MHz which I found disappointing. Depending on the clock speed it would do DDR3 1800MHz or DDR3 1680MHz all day long. It is my understanding that this issue was supposed to be resolved with the F2 BIOS and I was using the F3 BIOS.

Another odd quirk is that the board really responded to the CPU Clock Drive and PCI Express clock drive settings. They default to 700mV but this board loves the maximum setting of 1000mV. Also the CPU Clock Skew needed to be set to 300ps. This last setting literally was the difference between the board running for 1-5 minutes and the system rebooting or the board running for 30 minutes or more. While I’ve seen an impact with these settings before it was never anything quite on this level.

4.20GHz (210×19) DDR3 1680MHz

We used two different CPUs for our overclock testing. The Core i7 965 Extreme Edition and the Core i7 920. As illustrated above getting these results was no easy task.

3.99GHz (200×20) DDR3 1600MHz

As hard as it was to reach 210MHz BCLK on the Core i7 965 Extreme Edition, working with the Core i7 920 was worse. Using anything from automatic to similar settings as those used for the 965 I had numerous issues with this CPU and board combination. I found that with the Core i7 920 the board rarely would fail an overclock and reset the defaults so I could go in and make adjustments. Twice I had to clear the CMOS and set everything back up again.

I also had three instances of the board hard locking during POST. While I could get the board to POST happily at 210MHz BCLK I was unable to stabilize the overclock. When all was said and done 200MHz is the max I could do with any stability. In neither case was I able to get the board to run my memory at full speed. 1600MHz to 1800MHz was certainly possible depending on how my CPU was set in conjunction with the memory multiplier.

When it comes to overclocking I’ve seen boards do better than this one with less effort and for far less money. I’d like to think the board is capable of much more than I’ve seen thus far and Gigabyte claims this thing was designed with 6 core CPUs in mind and perhaps that’s true. Searching around on the internet I’ve found lots of excellent results but again none of them really went beyond 200MHz BCLK and most of them were using phase change or liquid nitrogen cooling.

So while I’ve seen boards costing nearly $500 less reach BCLK speeds higher than those I saw here, it’s hard for me to really slam the board too much given the complexity of working with it. With that said I’m disappointed that I didn’t get better results with water cooling. The chipset cooling solution seemed to work very well. I

nitially the way I had it positioned on my test bench I couldn’t get my 120mm fan blowing across it and the chipset was scorching hot. Once I repositioned the 120mm fan the temperatures dropped significantly. The heat sink suddenly became only slightly warm to the touch. Given how well it worked the water cooling feature is probably not terribly useful here especially given that no water makes its way to the south bridge which seems to produce the most heat thanks to the nForce 200 MCPs hidden under there.

Quirks

The most common one (which actually seems endemic to all Gigabyte motherboards) is their bad behavior with USB keyboards out of the box. I’m not exactly sure what the deal is with this but given the fact that I saw the retail transition from PS/2 to USB keyboards occur in the late 90’s, I can’t understand the reason for this seemingly minor oversight. While I’m on the subject I don’t even understand why motherboards even have PS/2 ports anymore.

They aren’t an option for most keyboards or mice and when they are, its via an adapter. For whatever reason Gigabyte seems to gloss over the fact that many people do not have PS/2 keyboards and when we connect a USB keyboard up to the machine we kind of need it to work. Most of the time with Gigabyte boards you need to drag out a PS/2 keyboard and set the legacy USB keyboard support to enabled.

Once that’s done you can typically disconnect the PS/2 keyboard and get on with your life. Evidently there were some issues with the F1 BIOS and this didn’t work. That problem was corrected with the F3 BIOS. However it still isn’t perfect. The F3 BIOS allowed the USB keyboard to work in the BIOS and allowed me to adjust settings, however when the system prompted me to “press any key to enter setup” I was unable to do so. I still had to go into the BIOS and enable legacy USB keyboard support. Gigabyte really needs to default this setting to enabled or they need to include a USB to PS/2 adapter in the box if they are simply unwilling to properly resolve the problem.

You also like noticed the two video encode applications that had very “odd” scores. We worked for days to try and figure out where the issue was but the scores were repeated over and over and over again no matter what tweaks we made.

Conclusion

Dan’s Thoughts:

The board was nothing if not stable at stock speeds. Overclocked it was stable as well but reaching that stability takes some added effort. Feature rich isn’t even the word for the X58-UD9. It has everything you could want and then some. Actually it even has features I wouldn’t want such as EIDE and floppy support. I’d also like to point out that this is the most well constructed and heaviest board I’ve ever handled. Fit and finish of the components, the cooling system, thickness and straightness of the PCB are all exceptional. The board seriously makes a positive impression when it comes to quality and workmanship.

Now I love the form factor. XL-ATX is just what multi-GPU users have been searching for. Unfortunately with that comes additional cost concerns. You need an XL-ATX compatible chassis of which there is only a limited selection of at the time of this writing. That tacks on a couple hundred bucks to the cost of your build you might not need to spend otherwise. Of course as time goes on and if the form factor catches on the case choices will increase and there will be a few lower cost options. Though I seriously doubt cost will be a factor for anyone who seriously considers purchasing this board. The limited case selection is probably more of a concern for anyone seriously entertaining the idea of purchasing this thing.

Beyond a few minor complaints with regard to the layout and the USB keyboard quirks the board really is quite excellent. But is it $700 excellent? Well that would depend on who you ask. If you are a professional overclocker and use liquid nitrogen to cool your system then you might be among the few who would be willing to pay the outrageous price for the X58A-UD9. If you want a board that can handle 4 air cooled high end GPUs, then you’ve really only got three choices out there right now and only one of them can be considered direct competition to the X58A-UD9.

Even so the X58A-UD9 offers USB 3.0 and SATA 6G Support. Your alternatives, namely the EVGA X58 4X SLI Classified (Now $300 after $100 MIR) and the EVGA SR-2 ($599) do not. Speaking of the alternatives these are considerably cheaper than the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 by a substantial sum. EVGA’s site shows and MSRP of $449.99 for the X58 4X SLI Classified and $599.99 for the SR-2. Though the latter is a dual processor board and isn’t really a fair “apples to apples” comparison, price-wise though it is $100 less than the X58A-UD9.

In short if you are looking to break some records using LN2 or you need a board that will hold four graphics cards for some high end multi-monitor gaming and you just have deep pockets the X58A-UD9 is really about as good as they come. Short of those three qualifiers you probably should be looking somewhere else for your next X58 chipset based board. There are many alternatives which will do probably about 95% of what the X58A-UD9 can do at literally a fraction of the price. Special circumstances aside I have a hard time recommending this board to anyone. Then again this is really a niche product anyway.

Kyle’s Thoughts:

Dan had a lot more experience with this motherboard than I did so I am going to keep my comments short.

Gigabyte pushed this board out way too quick. The F1 and F2 BIOS versions were full of bugs. I had odd stability problems and unrepeatable issues with F1 and F2. These early BIOS made the board a pain to use. The F3 BIOS was the one we did the majority of our final testing with and it did fix a lot of the issues. You likely saw some “quirky” numbers in the benchmarks and applications scores as well. No new BIOS “fixed” those issues either. Don’t really know what to say about that. The USB keyboard issues that Dan mentioned are simply inexcusable now days. We have been complaining about this for years. Gigabyte needs to get it fixed.

On the overclocking side of things, if you are going to be purchasing a $700 motherboard you are likely going to be buying a $1000 processor and with an Intel i7 980X CPU the UD9 did not disappoint. Getting the 980X into the 4.4GHz range with a vCore of 1.4v on a Koolance Exos system with a model 360 waterblock was not a problem. As advertised this motherboard can surely deliver CPU wattage to the processor without issue. Still however, for those of you looking to push a locked processor on merely water, the UD9 is not for you as it has BCLK limitations when you start talking about speeds in excess of 200MHz. Up to 210MHz though the board gave me no issues with Auto settings and the 980X. A locked Core i7 920 (C0) was a bit of a different story.

At stock speeds with our i7 980X the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 proved to be rock solid in terms of stability once we got the F3 BIOS from Gigabyte. If you are looking at this motherboard, I highly suggest updating to the latest BIOS before any serious usage.

The Bottom Line

The Gigabyte X58A-UD9 represents an extreme usage motherboard. Both in terms tweaking and its $700 price. The UD9 is not meant for those enthusiasts looking for a laid back overclocking experience. The UD9 requires a lot of patience and overclocking knowledge to use effectively. The X58A-UD9 is already racking up plenty of overclocking benchmarking awards. Those of us actually building a gaming system for use at home need not apply. Unless maybe you have liquid nitrogen tanker truck backed up to your garage door. The X58A-UD9 is Gigabyte’s flagship motherboard product and it is more an engineering showpiece than anything else.

Source:http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/08/17/gigabyte_x58aud9_extreme_motherboard_review/7