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- Date:
- Monday , February 01, 2010
- Author:
- Morry Teitelman
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
GIGABYTE X58A-UD7 Motherboard Review
The X58A-UD7 is GIGABYTE\'s newest entry into the fiercely competitive LGA1366 board arena. The board packs a lot of promise, built on GIGABYTE\'s tried and true X58 based design with some nice bells and whistles added for that extra bit of appeal including USB 3.0 and SATA III features.
Morry's Overclocking
The X58A-UD7 overclocked beautifully, after some initial dial-in issues. While the board itself would not run reliably with a base clock of over 190MHz, I was able to get the system solidly stable at a 190MHz base clock, with the CPU running at a cool 3.99GHz speed thanks to the use of a 21X multiplier. It appears that GIGABYTE found a way to enable access to the MAX+1 multiplier setting through the BIOS without having to rely on the TurboMode option. The overclock was done using an Intel i7 920 processor, Kingston HyperX KHX1600C9D3K6 memory modules running at 1520MHz, and a Swiftech GTZ water block hooked in to a tri-fan radiator. Note that this was also done using the air cooling option on the chipset heat pipe. The following voltage settings were required to get the system stabilized: 8-8-8-24-1T memory timings, 1.4375V CPU voltage, 1.52V QPI/Vtt voltage, 2.04V CPU PLL voltage, 1.34V QPI PLL voltage, 1.70V memory voltage, default settings DRAM termination and Vref voltages, 1.30V IOH voltage, 1.70V PCIE voltage, 1.30V ICH voltage, and 1.70V ICH I/O voltage.
The screenshots below show details on the above overclocking:
3.99GHz CPU speed with 1520MHz memory speed and 190MHz base clock
Kyle's Overclocking
I felt as though Morry's efforts had come up a bit short. Given that there was a new beta BIOS out about a month later after his initial testing, F3k, I wanted to go back in and give it another shot. I pulled out an "uber" processor, the Core i7-975. This is an "Extreme" processor and is multiplier unlocked from the factory. With simple multiplier tweaks and vCore tweaks to the 1.41v mark, I could get the i7-975 to run very stable at 4.45GHz with the memory at 1600MHz. I was using a Koolance Exos 2.5 and Model 350 water block. Obviously multiplier overclocking is not what we are looking for in a motherboard review, but I wanted to find the top end of our CPU first.
Moving on to Base Clock overclocking, I was able to push the BCLK to the 220MHz mark, but the mAHCIne was far from stable and I got the feeling that no amount of tweaking would ever it get it there. Keep in mind that I only spent about 6 hours with this unit, so I was far from exhausting all tweaking resources, but we did try more than a few. 215MHz BCLK was doable and I think with the proper experience and time you could get 215MHz solid, but I could not in the time allotted, but 215MHz was getting very close to stable and this was with our CPU at 4.3GHz. I finally ended up pulling back to 205MHz BCLK at 4.1GHz to get the system bullet proof. At this speed though, I had left the memory at 1640MHz bus speed. The Patriot memory we are using is rated at 2000MHz at 8-8-8-26 at 1.65v. I personally have never gotten it to do this with the CPU running over 4GHz, but again, I have not spent a lot of time tweaking on this, so I just everything to AUTO since I was running out of time. :)
With some somewhat ugly timings, we were able to get the system to POST and get to a desktop stable at 2050MHz memory bus. And we threw in a benchmark for good measure.
Conclusion
Morry's Thoughts:
GIGABYTE seemed to pull out all the stops for this board, with a good mix of technological prowess and design innovation to take the X58A-UD7 to a whole new level. The thing that most surprised me was the lack of tight areas on the board. Most everything is easily accessible no matter what mix of video cards and drives you have plugged in to the board, not to mention the top notch chipset cooling system. The add-on air cooling device works extremely well, and should not impede on the primary PCI-Express x16 slot at all. Add in the offered USB 3.0 ports and SATA 3 6Gb/s device support, and you have one heck of a competitor.
The X58A-UD7 did have a few shortcomings though. For me, the SATA3 Marvell controller was the board's AHCIlles heel, as I could not get the controller to recognize attached SATA 2 devices that did work on the other board SATA 2 based controllers. (We did correct this later, read below.) Also, the microphone performance using the onboard Realtek audio subsystem was not quite up to spec.
While the board did have a few minor issues, the superior design and feature set of the board as well as the performance of the board far outweigh them. All in all, a solidly implemented board, and definitely another feather in GIGABYTE's hat...
Kyle's Thoughts:
I have a lot of things to talk about when it comes to the X58A-UD7. First off, I really liked this board. Tons of forward looking features, but there are problems too, most of which I think will fade away as the BIOS matures, and if Gigabyte has done nothing else right in the industry, it has stayed on top of meaningful BIOS updates for its hardware.
The synthetic scores were a tiny bit low, but we think this will be addressed with BIOS maturation. I think Gigabyte is looking for the X58A-UD7 to be its flagship motherboard moving forward with Intel's upcoming Westmere (Nehalem migrated to 32nm process) architecture processor codenamed "Gulftown"( six-core twelve-thread) launch, so expect to see the BIOS get hammered on often in terms of performance and compatibility over the coming year.
Stability-wise, the X58A-UD7 was rock solid. Two days of Torture Testing did not unsteady our Gigabyte motherboard. On day three we moved the motherboard into the incubator and turned the heat up. The X58A-UD7 survived 24 hours with the incubator pushing temperatures of 48C. This was without its huge ass extra cooling heatsink that is supplied with the board, and that will occupy a slot and give you fins out the back of your chassis. Given what we saw, the extra cooling is not "needed" but you will surely want to go with it if you are not going to use the water block supplied on the board that is connected to the entire motherboard cooling system via very large heatpipes.
Here are some of my gripes. When you have the SATA 3 controllers turned on, the X58A-UD7 POST screen is VERY slow to pass. It will take up to two minutes to move past the POST screen. There is something getting "stuck" when it is looking to identify all the IDE/AHCI devices attached to the board. If you are tweaking the BIOS, you are best off with turning off the SATA 3 controllers till you finish, or this will likely drive you nuts. (Another issue that will likely be fixed with a BIOS update.) Sometimes during my tweaking, I would go overboard and the board would require a hard power down and a CMOS clear. Now, I am not sure if the BIOS actually required this, or if I was just being too impatient. Further along in testing I became aware that this may be the case. The X58A-UD7 does not do much BIOS related very fast...EXCEPT POST once you turn off the SATA 3. With the SATA 3 off, you will be lucky to see anything on the POST screen. On reboot, if you did not hard power down the X58A-UD7, many times you would be met with a "A disk read error occurred" after verifying DMI Pool Data. It seemed as though sometimes the AHCI would lose the drives. When you hard powered down between reboots, this did not seem to happen as much, although towards the end of testing, it lost my Blu-ray drive a couple of times on boot up. And lastly, "USB Keyboard" and "USB Mouse" options are disabled in the BIOS by default which can cause some issues with some DOS based programs along the way if you use them. I thought this issue was addressed a long time ago, but seems to be back. (We use some DOS based programs to clean up disk arrays and such before testing as well as some DIMM testing scenarios.)
While that is a fairly long list of gripes none of these are deal breakers, and I think all of them will be fixed sooner than later by Gigabyte and a BIOS update.
Testing the USB 3.0 on the X58A-UD7 was fun! USB 3.0 is going to kick ass when we finally start seeing lots of devices that make use of it. Our original "Super Speed" testing was done on this motherboard, and it did not disappoint. Our SATA 3 testing did leave us a bit confused. Morry mentioned having issues with getting his older SATA 2 hard drives to be seen by the Gigabyte SATA 3 controller. With a newer BIOS, I had no issues and tried all sorts of SATA 2 based drives. All my SATA 2 drives were seen by the SATA 3 controllers, and we had them set up for AHCI as well so hot swapping was not an issue either. One thing that was bothersome though, was the fact that our SATA 2 Intel SSD was SLOWER in sequential reads when connected to the SATA 3 controller. It was about 100MB/s slower; dropped from 240MB/s to 140MB/s when moved from SATA 2 to SATA 3. The burst speed however was hugely faster on the SATA 3 controller than SATA 2. I did not want to put a bunch of graphs up on this, as we are NOT sure about a few things here. First we don't have a SATA 3 drive in house. (We had one, that we burned up. 
) We also are unsure of our testing tools and Windows 7 seems to do some strange things when it comes to moving data. So yes, I think there might be an issue that needs to be looked into on the SATA 3 controllers, but to put it simply, we are not sure. More testing will need to be done. If there is an issue, it is likely a driver or BIOS issue rather than a hardware problem. Considering that it is near impossible to purchase a SATA 3 drive at the time of writing this, I think any problems will be buttoned up before it becomes a real issue.
The Bottom Line
We really like the Gigabyte X58A-UD7 motherboard. It does however feel like it was rushed out the door in an attempt to grab some of the "me first" spotlight when it comes to new features like USB 3.0 and SATA 3. The X58A-UD7 will overclock like a beast and has the stability needed to back that OCing up. The X58A-UD7 leans toward being an enthusiast-only motherboard, till you click one button in Easy Tune 6 and get a scalding 4.1GHz overclock after a reboot. Put into all of this that the X58A-UD7 is ready for Gulftown processors with a BIOS update and it is looking like a great package. Using the X58A-UD7 was exciting and fulfilling; that sounds kind of corny but it was. And I think we left the motherboard hiding much more performance than we exposed. There are quite simply a lot of tweaking hours in the X58A-UD7. There are a lot of little things that need to be fixed by Gigabyte BIOS engineers, but none of them seem to be deal breakers to us.
When it comes to value however, this is surely debatable. You did not think you were going to get overclocking, stability, SATA 3, USB 3.0, future 6-core support, and 32GB/s of memory bandwidth on the cheap did you? Provantage has the board currently for $347. To put it simply, more enthusiasts are going to find better values going with a P55 chipset board. But if you need a powerhouse system that is second to none, the Gigabyte X58A-UD7 seems to be a really good place to stick your processor.
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