X58 for the Masses: Gigabyte's EX58-UD3R & EX58-UD4P @ HotHardware.com

news · April 16, 2009

Hello Everyone,

Many positive commentaries have been written about Intel's current flagship

Core i7 processors and its companion X58 Express chipset, due to the solid

performance gains offered by the platform. In addition to the increased

performance offered by Core i7 processors though, the X58 chipset also

brings with it native support for ATI CrossFireX and NVIDIA SLI multi-GPU

technologies--provided support is available in the BIOS--as well as support

for the flexible triple channel memory controller integrated into the Core

i7. What might be concerning for some, however, is the overall cost of

putting together all of the components we just mentioned. Currently, the

cheapest Core i7 out there, the 920, will run you about $280, which is a

huge savings over the 940 at about double that price and the Extreme Edition

965 at a cool $1K. DDR3 memory has really come down in price, thankfully, so

picking up a three sticks of RAM is certainly not as pricey as it may have

been when the Core i7 launched. And obviously graphics cards pricing is all

over the map these days.

But, it all starts with the motherboard and most of the X58-based offerings

out there are not cheap. Simply put, being the latest and greatest always

commands a premium and it doesn't help when there's no real competition (on

the chipset level at least) to help keep prices in check. Thus, we were

very eager to test a couple of Gigabyte's latest X58 Express based

motherboards that are priced much more competitively than many of the other

X58 boards currently on the market. Gigabyte may have sacrificed a little

here or there to get to a lower price point, but with the five X58-based

boards they have in their line-up currently, there should be a board to fit

just about everyone's needs. Come on by and check out the Gigabyte EX58-UD3R

and EX58-UD4P...

X58 for the Masses: Gigabyte's EX58-UD3R & EX58-UD4P:

UD4P

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