Chances are, if you were to give someone the opportunity to build their dream gaming computer, it would comprise of an Intel X58 motherboard. This is because the X58 is still the only chipset to support LGA1366 processors, which are of course currently the world’s most powerful desktop processors and therefore an obvious choice for a dream machine.

There are an abundance of X58 motherboards available which is not surprising given the platform has existed for almost 2 years now. The Intel X58 chipset started life as a premium product with a typical motherboard price set well above $200 US. However as time went on pricing started to fall, as it often does, and today a quality X58 motherboard can be had for well under $200 US.

Still, most examples cost over $200 US, while there are a dozen examples that cost around $300 US or more. Motherboards such as the Asrock X58 Supercomputer ($270 US), DFI LP UT X58-T3eH8 ($280 US), MSI Big Bang-XPower ($300 US), Gigabyte X58A-UD7 ($340 US), Asus P6T7 WS Supercomputer ($400), and EVGA 170-BL-E762-A1 ($430 US) are all quite extreme in their own right.

Motherboards such as the MSI Big Bang-XPower, ASUS P6T7 WS Supercomputer and EVGA 170-BL-E762-A1 all have something in common, and we are not talking about the ludicrous price tags. These motherboards all feature at least half a dozen PCI Express x16 slots, allowing them to support 4-way SLI or 4-way ATI CrossfireX technology.

That is right, these crazy motherboards have been designed so even crazier gamers can stick four Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards together at a cost of over $1500 US just for the graphics cards. Fans of the green team might opt for four GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards instead, which is likely to cost at least $2000 US just for the graphics cards.

Gamers spending well over $1000 US on their graphics cards are probably not all that concerned with how much they spend on other components, such as the motherboard. At least this is what Gigabyte is banking on with their new X58A-UD9 motherboard. Most of you probably think that Asus is a little crazy asking $400 for their premium X58 motherboard, or that EVGA are off their meds if they think $430 is a reasonable price for their flagship X58 board.

If that is the case, then you best prepare yourself for the new Gigabyte X58A-UD9, which is set to cost a staggering ... wait for it, $700 US. At over 60% more expensive than the EVGA 170-BL-E762-A1, we have been scratching our heads as to why the X58A-UD9 is so expensive. Thankfully Gigabyte finally sent us a board so we could try and close the mystery as to why this board has been tagged with such an astronomical figure.

Memory support is no longer dictated by the motherboard, as the memory controller has been relocated to the processor. Evidently the motherboard still has a say in how many DIMM slots it will support, and while it does set the memory frequency and voltage, they must work to the Core i7 specifications.

While the Intel pre-production motherboard that we originally used to test the Core i7 processors only featured four DIMM slots, the X58A-UD9 like almost all X58 motherboards supports six. This makes it possible to use a pair of triple-channel memory modules for a maximum memory configuration of 24GB.

As things stand today Core i7 processors work with either DDR3-1066 or DDR3-1333 memory, however through overclocking the X58A-UD9 offers official support for DDR3-2200+ memory as well.

The Gigabyte X58A-UD9 features a total of seven PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots and impressively four of them can provide full x16 bandwidth. The other three slots are limited to x8, which should still be enough for many high-end devices.

On that note, along with standard 4-way CrossfireX support, the X58A-UD9 supports 4-way SLI. This is really what the X58A-UD9 is all about and should only be purchased by those planning on pairing it with four of the most powerful ATI or Nvidia graphics cards.

Moving on to storage, the familiar ICH10R south bridge provides support for six SATA 3Gb/s ports. Furthermore, support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID5, RAID 10, and JBOD is also included, providing users with a great deal of flexibility. Other than the SATA support provided by the ICH10R south bridge chip, Gigabyte has also included the Gigabyte SATA2, Marvell 9128 and JMicron JMB362 chips.

The Gigabyte SATA2 (Re-labeled JMicron JMB363) controller offers an IDE connector and a pair of SATA (3Gb/s) ports. Meanwhile the JMicron JMB362 chip serves up an additional two SATA 3Gb/s connectors, which have been used to provide the motherboards eSATA support. Finally the Marvell 9128 chip provides a pair of SATA 6Gb/s ports that support RAID 0, and RAID 1.

Another chipset feature is the Intel High Definition Audio (Intel HD Audio). This provides eight independent DMA audio engines that support multiple audio streams with audio codecs. Driving this feature is the Realtek ALC889 codec, enabling high-quality 192KHz/24-bit audio output.

The X58A-UD9 supports IEEE1394a (Firewire 400) useful for bandwidth-intensive applications like digital video (DV), professional audio, and external hard drives, which often consume hundreds or even thousands of megabytes of data per file. The board provides three 1394a ports due to the inclusion of the T.I. TSB43AB23 Firewire controller.

The more obvious USB 2.0 support comes from the ICH10R chipset, and therefore the X58A-UD9 supports a total of twelve ports (4 on the I/O panel + 8 additional using the supplied brackets). Support for the new USB 3.0 standard also exists with the inclusion of the NEC D720200F1 chip which provides a pair of USB 3.0 ports.

The X58A-UD9 features a pair of Realtek RTL8111E Gigabit LAN controllers which use the PCI Express bus for maximum throughput. These controllers support both Teaming and Smart Dual LAN. Gigabyte Smart Dual LAN technology features clever LAN port auto-switching between the two physical Gigabit LAN chips, offering hassle-free, zero downtime, high-speed network connectivity.

An interesting feature that Gigabyte has added to all of their new motherboards is called “3x USB Power Boost” which is designed to deliver greater compatibility and extra power for USB devices. This unique USB power design is also able to efficiently regulate output over the full voltage range, which greatly enhances USB device compatibility. In addition, dedicated lower resistance fuses ensure lower voltage drops, and provide more stable and plentiful power delivery.

In the top right hand corner of the board is a pair of 8-pin ATX 12v power connectors, which are rarely seen on desktop motherboards. This means that extreme overclockers can feed a huge amount of power directly to the processor; useful but only under extreme circumstances.

The Gigabyte X58A-UD9 sports a feature called “Unlocked Power” which features an all new 24 phase design. This massive 24 phase design utilizes low core energy loss Ferrite Core Chokes as well as Low RDS(on) Driver-MOSFETs, which are able to handle a higher current load and at the same time offer better power efficiency and lower operating temperatures. Each power phase of the motherboard has 3 main components, 1 choke, 1 capacitor and 1 MOSFET.

Unlocked Power is designed to deliver better durability and longer component lifespan through the use of the industry's first Dual Power Switching design. When Dual Power Switching is activated, 2 sets of 12 power phases operate in tandem, automatically turning on one set of 12 phases and powering down the other 12, allowing the non active set to rest. Unlike a traditional power design where some of the same power phases are always in operation, which can cause them to wear out and fail prematurely, Dual Power Switching ensures that each set of phases share the power workload, effectively doubling the lifespan of the phases.

Another unique feature of Gigabyte Dual Power Switching is that if one of the power phases for whatever reason is damaged or fails, the motherboard will automatically disable its group of 12 phases, allowing the motherboard to operate using the other set of twelve. With traditional motherboards, if one power phase fails, the board is unable to operate.

At the opposite side of the motherboard are the 7 PCIe x16 slots which are connected to the X58 chip, while additional PCI Express lanes are provided by a pair of Nvidia NF200 chips. The worthiness of the NF200 chips has been questioned, with many saying today’s graphics cards work just as well without them in an x8 configuration rather than x16. Sadly we only have two GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards and will not be able to test this feature of the motherboard.

As you would expect from a tier 1 board maker, the design of the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 is very neat and tidy. For example, the PCI Express x16 graphics card ports are well clear of the six DIMM slots. This means it is possible to install/remove memory with a full size graphics card installed. Motherboards that place the DIMM slots too close to the PCI Express x16 port, force users to remove the graphics card first before installing/removing memory modules.

The first of seven PCIe 2.0 x16 ports is wired for full x16 bandwidth while the second, which will most likely be unusable as it will be blocked by a dual slot graphics card, is only wired for x8 bandwidth. The third slot, which is usable, is wired for x16 bandwidth, and then the fourth x8 bandwidth. The fifth slot provides the full x16 bandwidth, while the sixth slot at the very bottom of the motherboard provides x8 bandwidth, and finally the seventh slot gets full 16x bandwidth.

This configuration means that it is very possible to install four Radeon HD 5870 or GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards for example, and have them all working with x16 bandwidth. Of course spending at least $1500 US on graphics cards is not for the faint of heart, but for those willing to, Gigabyte provides a means to the madness.

Moving on, the SATA ports are placed together in the bottom right corner where they are easy to access and are also mounted on a 90-degree angle to avoid interfering with long graphics cards. The CMOS battery is also well placed in the bottom right corner of the motherboard, along with the CMOS clear jumper. There is also a clear CMOS switch located on the I/O panel, so should things go wrong resetting the BIOS can be done very easily.

The I/O panel is well stocked and includes just two legacy ports, being the PS/2 ports for older keyboards and mice. Also found on the I/O panel are four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, six audio jacks, coaxial/optical S/PDIF out connectors, dual Firewire ports, dual eSATA ports and dual LAN connectors.

Out of the box the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 features a water-cooling block over the north bridge for extreme overclocking. However for those not interested in water-cooling, Gigabyte has included a huge passively cooled heatsink as well, the good news is that both can also be used at the same time. This is a feature we have seen Gigabyte implement on their high-end motherboards in the past, and we feel it is a nice touch for the X58A-UD9. The only problem we have with the design is that the water-cooling connections are too small.

Before we move to the overclocking results, there were two issues we noticed when working with this BIOS. First and foremost the BIOS would often freeze when we entered MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.) menu, which was frustrating. However our sample did come with the initial BIOS release, being version F1. After visiting the Gigabyte website we found that the BIOS revision was now at F3 and we also noticed that the F2 release notes listed “Fixed hang up in BIOS M.I.T. page when using USB keyboard” as one of the fixes.

That said, the F3 revision which was released just a week after the F2 revision, featured just one update which was “Fixed USB keyboard behavior abnormal in BIOS setup M.I.T page issue”. This appeared to be quite an issue for Gigabyte, but we are happy to report that within just a month of releasing the X58A-UD9 this bug was squashed.

The second equally bothersome issue was the inability to manage BIOS profiles/configurations, which can be very irritating when trying to overclock. These days it is just assumed that any motherboard costing over $200 will provide you with that kind of ability. Again this is something we hope Gigabyte can correct in a future update, but since this has been an issue with all X58 motherboards to date, we are not hopeful.

Now, once in the “Advanced Frequency Settings” sub menu which is found in the MB Intelligent Tweaker menu, we were able to reach a 4.32GHz overclock using a Core i7 980X Extreme Edition processor (from the original 3.33GHz). We set the CPU Clock Ratio to 32x and left the BCLK Frequency at 133Mhz. The DRAM frequency was set to 1333MHz, while the QPI frequency remained at 3.2GHz. Finally the CPU voltage was increased to 1.34v, which we considered to be safe enough.

Because we were running the memory above specification, the DRAM voltage was increased to 1.64v, which is the highest recommended setting; going higher could damage the processor, we've been told. All other BIOS settings were left as is, meaning a total of just three settings were altered in order to reach this impressive overclock.

Pushing the Core i7 980X Extreme Edition processor past 4.32GHz was difficult, and each time we tried we were met with numerous stability issues. This seems to be the limit of our processor, at least when using an air-cooler. Still, a 4.32GHz overclock on such a powerful processor is nothing to be ashamed about. It is worth noting that other quality Intel X58 motherboards, such as the Asus P6T Deluxe, achieved this same frequency when using our Core i7 980X processor with the Prolimatech Megahalems air-cooler.

Hardware - Intel Core i7 980X - x3 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 8-8-8-24) - Seagate 500GB 7200-RPM (Serial ATA300) - Radeon HD 5870 (1GB) Crossfire - Asus P6T Deluxe (Intel X58) - Gigabyte X58A-UD9 (Intel X58) Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) - ATI Catalyst 10.6

Hardware - Intel Core i5 750 - x2 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 8-8-8-24) - Seagate 500GB 7200-RPM (Serial ATA300) - Radeon HD 5870 (1GB) Crossfire - Asus P7P55D-E Premium (Intel P55) Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) - ATI Catalyst 10.6

Hardware - AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition - x2 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 8-8-8-24) - Seagate 500GB 7200-RPM (Serial ATA300) - Radeon HD 5870 (1GB) Crossfire Asus Crosshair IV Formula (AMD 890FX) Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) - ATI Catalyst 10.6

Both the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 and the Asus P6T Deluxe motherboards were tested using the Intel Core i7 980X six-core processor using DDR3-1333 memory with CAS7 timings. As you can see, the results were very similar across these two boards, though it appears that the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 has a slight memory bandwidth advantage when compared to the Asus P6T Deluxe.

The SPECviewperf v10 results saw almost no difference in performance between the Intel X58 motherboards. The Gigabyte X58A-UD9 was roughly 1fps faster in the 3dsMax test, though the results were close enough to call a tie.

Interestingly, when using Povray 3.6v we found that the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 was roughly 3 seconds faster than the Asus P6T Deluxe. However more interesting is the fact that the much cheaper AMD Phenom II X6 1090T processor was able to outperform the mighty Intel Core i7 980X in this test.

CINEBENCH R11.5 is another synthetic benchmark that we have tested this new Gigabyte X58 motherboard with. While the CPU result was much the same on both the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 and Asus P6T Deluxe motherboards, the Gigabyte board was 4fps faster when running the OpenGL test.

The Intel Core i7 980X processor is incredibly fast when using Microsoft Excel 2007 and this can be seen when using the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 and Asus P6T Deluxe motherboards. While the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 was a fraction faster, both X58 motherboards performed within 1 second of each other. Amazingly the completion time of the BigNumberCrunch test was half that of the Core i5 750 configuration.

The Gigabyte X58A-UD9 and Asus P6T Deluxe were neck and neck when testing with WinRAR. Our custom compression test saw both motherboards complete the 400MB program compression in 24 seconds, while the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 was 5 seconds faster when compressing the 700MB audio/video file.

The Intel Core i7 980X was again breathtakingly fast when testing with Adobe Photoshop CS5, as it was able to apply the radial blur filter to an 88MP image in just 17 seconds. This time was achieved on both the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 and Asus P6T Deluxe motherboards.

When testing with HandBrake the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 was roughly 2fps faster than the Asus P6T Deluxe, with an impressive 93.6fps, making it one of the fastest non-overclocked configurations that we have ever tested.

The Gigabyte X58A-UD9 continued to deliver strong performance, this time when testing with the x264 HD Benchmark 3.0, where it provided a frame rate of 91.1fps making it roughly 3fps faster than the Asus P6T Deluxe.

The TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress results were again competitive between the Intel X58 motherboards, but the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 was again able to just out muscle the Asus P6T Deluxe. The avi to mpg conversion was 28 seconds faster when using the Gigabyte X58A-UD9, for a total time of just 6 minutes and 29 seconds.

The Gigabyte X58A-UD9 again displayed strong performance delivering the highest average frame rate at 1024x768, while it was neck and neck with the Asus P6T Deluxe at 1920x1200, when testing with Unreal Tournament 3.

Much the same was found when testing with Far Cry 2. The Gigabyte X58A-UD9 was able to outpace the Asus P6T Deluxe at 1024x768, while both boards delivered the same performance at 1920x1200.

Finally when testing with Resident Evil 5, the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 again delivered at 1024x768, though interestingly this time the Asus P6T Deluxe was a few frames per second faster at 1920x1200.

Unsurprisingly the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 is not quite as power efficient as the Asus P6T Deluxe due to all those extra embedded chips. As a result the idle consumption level was 20% greater, while the load consumption was just 7% higher when using the Gigabyte X58A-UD9.

Typically we review sensible products designed for the mainstream markets and like to focus on products that deliver maximum bang for your buck, such as the GeForce GTX 460 graphics card or the Phenom II X2 555 processor. When reviewing these kinds of products we focus heavily on the price vs. performance ratio.

However every once and a while we come across a product that requires us to neglect our standard review protocol and evaluate it for what it is, a crazy product designed for an even crazier individual. Things like value and practicality are thrown out the window, as neither have any place in the same sentence as a product such as the Gigabyte X58A-UD9.

So then before we go any further, please understand that we are not even going to consider factors such as value when writing our conclusion for the X58A-UD9. After all, the sole purpose of this motherboard is to accommodate a quad SLI or CrossfireX setup, neither of which scales very well and in all honesty represents very poor value.

Should you not wish to purchase four of the world’s most powerful graphics cards and stick them all in the same box, then there is no point in purchasing the X58A-UD9, the X58A-UD7 does all the same things at less than half the price.

If however, all you want is a motherboard that can support 4-way SLI or CrossfireX, then the EVGA 170-BL-E762-A1 or Asus P6T7 WS Supercomputer will do so for around $300 US less than the Gigabyte X58A-UD9. That said, the X58A-UD9 does feature more SATA ports than both these motherboards, while SATA 6Gb/s is also on the menu. Furthermore, the Gigabyte board boasts USB 3.0 support, which is not found on either the EVGA or Asus boards.

Still, having said that, for the $300 US price discrepancy we feel users can quite comfortably add USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s support if they wish to do so. The simple fact of the matter is that the $700 US price tag of the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 makes no sense what so ever, but we think that is the point. Basically Gigabyte is charging an absurd price premium for their flagship X58 board simply because it is the most feature packed motherboard available.

There is no reason, at least as far as we can tell, as to why this motherboard should cost $700 US. It would seem that Gigabyte are hoping anyone able to drop $2000 US on the latest 4-way SLI setup is probably not going to blink twice when spending $700 US on a motherboard, and well, they are probably right. So then this product really needs no review, as those who typically read reviews like to know exactly what they are getting before parting with their hard earned cash, and with the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 what you get for $700 US doesn’t quite add up.