My Review of the Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard

The Gigabyte EX58-UD5 : A review by Punx223

Over the past few weeks I have had the great opportunity to work with the Gigabyte EX58-UD5.
Mind you this is my first major full time venture into the X58 1366 socket platform, so let’s continue.

First of all a great amount of thanks goes to Gigabyte for providing the board to test with. I have used many Gigabyte boards in the past, and if this board is nearly as easy to use or as easy to overclock as the previous, I do not see how all of the other motherboard manufacturers stay in business.

We start with an overlook of the entire board to see how well it is laid out, and any possible issues we may encounter. There were a few things I did notice with the layout. I see the chipset cooler appears to be very similar to the one I previously have seen on the EP45-UD3P, which shares not only its styling but hopefully its excellent cooling characteristics.

+ Large heatpipe cooler

+ Cooler very well laid out to allow fitment of most large aftermarket coolers without issue.

+ Very low profile but efficient southbridge portion of cooler completely clears any large graphics cards.

+ Inclusion of a 4x slot for usage of non graphics cards (graphics cards will not fit in slot as the leg going to the southbridge cooler would be in the way.)

+ 10 total serial ata ports (6 “blue” controlled ICH10R southbridge, 4 “white” controlled by 2 different Jmicron controllers) for a very large amount of drive expandability.

+ Onboard power and clear Cmos buttons for ease of use outside of the case.

+ Onboard  2 digit post display to assist with potential no post condition diagnosis.

+ 8 rear IO panel usb’s plus 4 main available from the onboard headers

+ 12 Phase CPU power for ultimate stability when pushing overclocks or heavily loaded situations.

+ Onboard power phase, temperature, and overclock LED’s give you a real time look into how your system is running.

That is just the start of the features that I love about this boards layout.  There are also a few things that concern me about the layout and may be problematic to potential users.

- Lowest Pci-e slot location: If running Tri SLI with dual slot cooled cards you would need a case with 8 expansion slots, whereas most cases have 7

- X58 chipset only provides 32 Pci-e lanes, so tri sli setups will be 16x8x8x  this is actually very common.

- Onboard power phase status and overclock LED’s can be quite bright, and if in a windowed case can be overpowering.

As you can see there are some things to look at when thinking of this board,   but otherwise the board layout and coloring scheme is very well laid out and subtle enough.  In a world where off the wall color schemes and UV reactive seems to be the norm.  I found this board to be a peaceful break from that, as its styling to me was very nice subtle and yet functional.

Installation

Installation turned out to be as easy as any motherboard I have ever done.  It carries the standard ATX layout and all connections for the most part are located at the immediate edges of the board to allow for easy routing and cable management.  You will find that the IO shield does have covers over the Network ports that do need to be bent back, be sure to do so as that would be quite troublesome to do once the board is completely installed.

When testing a few cases for installation I did notice that the screw midway down the board below the sata ports can be difficult to get to,  otherwise it installed with the greatest of ease (unlike compared to a few other boards I have tested recently.)

The board actually has both keyboard and mouse PS2 ports.  Something that is starting to disappear in a lot of boards these days,  but a welcome addition for any legacy user that is ready to upgrade systems but loves they’re old keyboard.

Bundled Accessories

The board comes a very complete accessory selection. These include SLI connectors (both a flexible dual SLI and a rigid 3 way SLI), sata cables (a total of 4 yellow cables with right angle plugs on one end), floppy and IDE cables, e-sata bracket with included power cable and e-sata cable, full Motherboard manual including motherboard driver/software cd, multi language manual, and of course an IO shield.

Bios Layout

The bios is pretty much a standard Award bios, with the addition of the first menu “MIT”  or “Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker”. This section is very intuitive and very easy to use for the overclocking of pretty much every component of the system.  I found this area very easy to use,  and very easy to learn compared to many boards out there. The bios offers full ability to overclock the system, and also offers the CIA which is basically a small safe overclock the board will do for you automatically without having to be too deep into settings (definitely a major plus for any novice overclocker)

I did find that there were a few settings that seemed odd.   For instance the QPI  link speed slow mode was extremely too slow   whereas the slowest realistic speed can be a bit too high at certain high Bclk situations.

Also under advanced clock controls you have your drive settings along with skews, and the pci-e freq and the CIA feature I mentioned earlier

The memory timings are well laid out and very nice to be able to setup each channel individually.

Voltages are well laid out as well,   but I have found that this board does very well with auto voltages especially for moderate or 24/7 overclocks. All to often in other boards, auto settings can be inadequate for anything beside initial startup…this is a refreshing change and should help some as they begin to overclock with this board.

Test setup

Motherboard: Gigabyte X58-UD5
CPU: Core I7 920 D0 stepping
Memory: Kingston DDR3 2000 Mhz Cas8 3x1gb
Hdd: Patriot SSD 32gb Qty2  in raid level 0
Graphics card: Gigabyte GTX 260 Super overclock
CPU cooling: Promiliatech Megahalems with Scythe ultra kaze 3000RPM fan
PSU: Corsair HX 1000

Getting started overclocking

First things first I decided to test with each of the auto overclocks to see how the board worked,   and as expected it definitely pulled off the overclocks and without a hitch.   They were very simple overclocks  but then again its a free eprformance boost and gives you a decided jump over the stock performance for no extra charge.

Next I decided to see how the board scaled when just trying to clock it myself.  So I started by leaving everything on auto and upping the Bclk directly through Bios.

I was very surprised as the board went to 200 Bclk with everything on auto with the exception of setting up the ram correctly.  Not only did the board start but ran almost completely stable Passed Linx testing 4 out of 5 passes.

That speaks extremely well for the board as it can automatically set these settings and get the board to such a level of stability with basically no user intervention.  With a little voltage tweaking I was able to get the board running 24/7 stable at 4 ghz  200×20 stable with a ram speed of 1600 mhz CAS7 which returned very remarkable results.

One strange thing I did run into is that the board occasionally would have a strange post cycling and list a failed overclock once posted  on a 24/7 stable overclock.

Benchmark testing

To start off with we run them at stock (all stock runs of each bench on left side)

Wprime is basically a multithreaded number crunching bench…it gives us a chance to test all 8 threads of the CPU. On the right is the overclocked run of the exact same test. You will notice how large of a difference that made, so imagine how much difference it would make when encoding a video or any other normal application.

Now on to 3dmark vantage. On the left is a stock single card run. Once more on the right is the overclocked single card run. Notably, not a large increase as only the cpu score went up,but the graphics score is largely unaffected,…Lets see if the bottleneck is the single card?

There we have it, this processor/motherboard combo is very efficient, so that leads to the graphics cards being a huge bottleneck,  and adding the second card increased the score amazingly.

Gaming overclock testing

These tests are to show how well the board scales in real life gaming situations. Both single GPU and dual/SLI configurations. The games used are Crysis and Cryostasis. Both games are fairly new with very intensive graphics engines.

First up on the left is Cryostasis single card, followed on the right by Cryostasis in SLI. As you can see the cards one again scale beautifully together and make for a very good performance and frame-rate jump.

Next up is CRYSIS!  This game is very system intensive and still very difficult to get playable frame-rates in large resolutions without a “state of the art” system.

Once again on the left is the single card run: Not bad considering that this is just a single super overclocked GTX260. But here is the result on the right with 2 cards in SLI: As you see the games scaled very well in SLI.     But one thing to note, on games so graphically demanding, I saw almost no increase (not even 1 FPS difference between 2.66ghz stock CPU and 4ghz overclocked CPU). Once again this CPU/motherboard combo apparently work very efficiently together, and quickly rendered the single GPU as a bottleneck.

“EASYTUNE” Utility

For anyone not aware, many motherboard manufacturers have been bundling software utilities that not only monitor health of the hardware but now also assist with some level of software overclocking past whats available in the bios.

The software included by Gigabyte is labeled “EASYTUNE” and it represents exactly what the tool does, making it very easy to tune and monitor your system from one easy “hassle free” utility. I included some screenshots of the overclocking features to help demonstrate what features are offered by this utility.

+Temperature, voltage, and fan speed monitoring

+Graphics card monitoring

+Memory settings and memory SPD information

+CPU information, along with motherboard details.

+A full overclocking section with frequency and voltage settings for most setting,…most can be changed actively without ever leaving the OS.

Conclusion and final thoughts

The board was very impressive, and I must say it did live up to the expectations I have for a Gigabyte board. Not only did it live up to those but it smashed through them, and set a new record for me as for the ease of overclock and ease of usability.

Aside from the issue with tri SLI needing 8 expansion slots, the board is amazing and very powerful.  Anyone looking to build a great gaming rig that also has all of the power features to allow for lower heat dissipation but also a much nicer power bill when doing standard desktop tasks,  this would be an excellent choice for you.

In Review;

+Excellent bios.

+Great chipset cooling

+Lots of onboard options

+Excellent board layout

And on the downside;

-Needs 8 expansion slots in case to run Tri SLI

-occasional strange post cycle on cold boot on a 24/7 stable overclock.

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Review written and photographed by Shannon/Punx223
Edited and submitted by Romdominance