Gigabyte X58A-UD9 and GTX480 Quad Sli Review
First Look
Published: 27th July 2010 | Source: Gigabyte | Price: £465.99 |
First Look
She's a big lass for sure. This is the kind of box that could sleep a family of four in comfort. One of the things that's instantly surprising is how insanely busy the box is with information and tech logos and the like. The chances of anyone going "£450 for a motherboard? Sounds a bargain" is miniscule. No this will only be brought by those who specifically need its feature-set. So calm the box down accordingly. A Rolls Royce hasn't got go faster stripes. A Renault Clio has.
Anyone once the box lid is lifted we get our glimpse of the UD9 itself. And yet more logos, just in case you missed the ones on the front.
Here is a bit of a surprise. The rear is also emblazoned with those same "Unlocked Power" and "333" logos we've been bombarded with on the front. You'd hope Gigabyte might have enough confidence in their product to not need this showy display. Taking the motherboard out the packet we can see that despite it being an e-ATX motherboard it's still not got a single centimeter of unused space. This is thanks to it truly having everything anyone could want.
Looking at the board from the "front" you are instantly struck by the size of the southbridge heatsink. There is a good reason for this as under there lurks the NF200 chip that powers the PCI-e slots, ensuring all of them have x16 capability even when fully populated.
Accessories are as good as any board we've seen. Obviously you get your manual, drivers and IO shield.
We also have eSATA, SATA, IDE and the like. Two Crossfire bridges an SLI bridge, and two hard SLI bridges. One for Tri-SLI and one for Quad-SLI. A Quad-SLI gives us an idea...
Just in case you weren't sure that the UD9 gives you Unlocked Power from the logo on the front of the box, the insert, the rear and the manual, we also have a Gigabyte VIP card.
Finally for those of you who don't have a case with native e-ATX support, Gigabyte have provided three standoffs to ensure the bottom half isn't flapping about unsecured.
Most Recent Comments
P.S. Love the new watermark btw.
Regards to everyone in OC3D even the cleaners if you have any.
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Originally Posted by name='silenthill'
Fantastic, amazing, fabulous, unbelievable, jaw dropping, I enjoyed every minute of it, you deserve a 5 star for this one, just lovely truly professional, pure enjoyment, I truly love you guys,
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Nice review though.
:haha: :haha: :haha:
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Originally Posted by name='silenthill'
Well your signature looks like readings from a cheap hand blood pressure machine
:haha: :haha: :haha: |
4xsli is a joke. How gutted would you be if you bought the board for that reason only to get the results you have shown.
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Originally Posted by name='w3bbo'
Fantastic looking board. I don't think there will be too many wanting to shill out £450 for this though with the new round of CPUs on the horizon.
4xsli is a joke. How gutted would you be if you bought the board for that reason only to get the results you have shown. |
:topic:|
Originally Posted by w3bbo
Fantastic looking board. I don't think there will be too many wanting to shill out £450 for this though with the new round of CPUs on the horizon. 4xsli is a joke. How gutted would you be if you bought the board for that reason only to get the results you have shown. |
I am not rich, by any means. Let me point one thing out though. I do multimedia production work, and use some proprietary PCIe cards in that work. The cards MUST follow consecutive slot orders. So that made the ud9 one of only 3 options for my needs. The EVGA lacked the sata3 and a few features. The ASUS SC has been plagued with problems. So that only left the ud9. Well to be fair there was a small assortment of high end server boards also, but none exactly fit the bill.
ALSO, Gigabyte does make the promise that they will "custom engineer" BIOS features for ud9 users. This is critical for my needs. As my software/hardware matures, I am constantly running into dma/irq issues with mobo's/os's. If Gigabyte makes good on their promise and expedites BIOS implementations even ONE day ahead of the competition. The board has payed for itself.
Not to brag or tout my other hardware, but the proprietary PCI cards I use run about $15k for 3, so the premium for the ud9 was really not that big of a deal (in the bigger picture).
Now for the icing on the cake. I was previously running these cards in a MAC
Apple was forcing me to buy a new $7k computer every 2 years or so, just to keep up. So now that I moved over to a Win platform, the performance is through the roof....and I have under $4k into a system that utterly DEMOLISHES the MacPro in BOTH cost and performance.
I think the ud9 is actually a bargain, considering what it does. If there was ONE single competing product on the market...I would call it as you have.....but there is not.
I don't regret my purchase one bit. I am not just talking artificial benches....I am talking REAL WORLD performance. 24/7
ud9 is truly the current king
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