Review Conclusion of Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 Intel X58 Mainboard for Nehalem Core i7 940

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Review Conclusion of Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 Intel X58 Mainboard for Nehalem Core i7 940
Bluetooth 3 Nov 2008

Conclusion

In the weeks to come, we are sure to receive more boards based on the new Intel X58 chipset. For Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5, we feel that this board has a good feature set ranging from Dual GbE, 1394, eSATA, DES etc.

In terms of Performance, we compared it to the QX9770 running X48/P45 chipsets. Synthetic benchmarks gives a nice boost of around 10% comparing a 2.93GHz (Intel Core i7 940) vs a 3.2GHz (QX9770). In real applications, we see that the 2.93GHz is able to match the speed of the QX9770 at 3.2GHz. As we can see from Cinebench10, the single core processing is slower but when multicore kicks in, it is 10% faster than the QX9770.

In terms of overclocking, the BIOS included a large range of FSB and voltage options available. You can see the BIOS options here. In our o/c test, we used the 940 and overclock the BCLK. As all 920, 940 processors are locked, there is no way we can increase the multiplier. As we have mentioned in our overclocking guide, overclocking the Core i7 is quite different from that of the Core 2 Duo. A lot of things need to be factored in. With a 965, BCLK is able to reach 200MHz (from 133MHz). As for 940, our best stable clk is 150x22 or 3.3GHz on AIR cool. It seems that the limitation are from the CPU itself than from the board.

In conclusion, this board has the best for overclocking enthusiasts, the Clr CMOS, Power Switch are just some good features of the board. There is also DES to help save energy and copper to cool down the board. We look forward to newer processors that will overclock better in the future.

For beta bios, please visit http://my.ocworkbench.com/bbs

Discuss

Pros

DES
Wide range of BCLK
2 GbE
Debug LED

Cons

X58 boards are way too expensive

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.

Category	Score
Performance	8 / 10
Features	10 / 10
Ease Of Installation	10 / 10
Overclocking Features	9 / 10
Documentation	8 / 10
Packaging	10 / 10
Cost / Performance	7 / 10
Overall Rating :	8.8 / 10

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