A Closer Look:
The GA-EX58-UD3R is a full ATX motherboard that features Intel’s latest X58 chipset. The high end 6.4 GT/s QPI interface means that this board will be able to handle the full bandwidth of the high end Intel Core i7’s along with DDR3 1600 and up without being a bottleneck. The dual PCI express x16 slots mean that this board supports CrossfireX, but more on that in a minute. The large heat pipes for the chipset look very nice, but would interfere with expansion cards if there were anything but PCI express 1x slots at the top. The 8 sata ports are side mounted and spread across 2 SATA-II controllers (Gigabyte’s own SATA controller and the standard ICH10R chipset controller). Some people like the side mounting, others hate it, it all comes down to preference.
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Teaching An Old Dog A New Trick:
While all motherboards that have the X58 chipset technically have the capability to run both CrossfireX and SLI, it is the job of the OEM (Gigabyte in this instance) to pay the companies for the licensing fees to use their multi-GPU solutions. Until 3/30/09 this board did not have the ability to run Nvidia cards in SLI. Fortunately Gigabyte decided to pay the licensing fees to have SLI enabled on the board. They in turn rolled out a BIOS update that enabled the feature. This is a very nice gesture on Gigabyte’s part and makes this board worth even more for its cost.
Too Close For Comfort:
During our initial testing we tried to install our dual Palit 4870’s to test out CrossfireX, only to find that there was no way it was going to work. With both cards in the motherboard there simply isn’t enough room for the cards to cool themselves. These particular cards cool themselves by blowing back into the case. As you can see in the picture, there is no room for the air to ventilate for the top card. This is very upsetting for someone who wants to run CrossfireX on this board, without their cards actually catching on fire. Dual slot cards that exhaust through the PCI slot on the back may be alright, such as the new 4890, but this is really on a per card basis and depends solely on the heat output and thermal threshold of the card. The only other option is to run dual single-slot graphics cards in either CrossfireX or SLI, such as the 4850 or the 9800GT. The only downside is that you won’t be on the bleeding edge of graphics with this kind of setup. This is a limitation of the board that is not easily noticed prior to purchase, but this is why you have nice people at TechwareLabs to tell you about these things.
