![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , August 17, 2010
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Gigabyte X58A-UD9 Extreme Motherboard Review
The Gigabyte X58A-UD9 is not only massive, but its easily the most expensive board we've ever seen. In fact the cost of the X58A-UD9 exceeds the cost of most workstation motherboards and I find myself asking, the questions: Why? Who does Gigabyte intend to sell this board to? And...What can this board offer that a $450 board cannot?
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.