Thread: Gigabyte’s GA-X58-USB3.

Greatly it’s no longer a major financial cocern to get into Intel’s happening socket. Yes you can spend a major price of cash on a board that you can boot using the Bluetooth on your phone but for many DIYers 200 is the most they’ll spend on a mobo. Enter Gigabyte’s GA-X58-USB3. As the name says it’s a USB 3.0 board using Intel’s old but still quite wanting X58 chipset.

Think of the GA-X58-USB3 as a way-cheaper range of the GA-X58A-UD7 board that we went through in the October 2010 matter.With a street price of 170 it’s naturally half the cost of the UD7 and about 30 less than the Asus Sabertooth X58 board we reviewed in the Holiday 2010 case. Gigabyte does that by shaving off a lot of the advantages from the UD7 such as the water blocks and extra heatsinks.



The USB3 also backwards from the UD7’s 24-phase power the onboard power switches and POST LED. You get the point. However as with the Asus Sabertooth X58 the GA-X58-USB3 doesn’t feel like a total strippo motherboard.

There are still strong heatsinks on the chipset and voltage maintaing modules. We also like the layout of the GA-X58-USB3 board over the Sabertooth X58. With the Sabertooth X58 the whole PCI slot is covered if you put a dual-slot GPU into the top x16 slot. With the GA-X58-USB3 you can still work the PCI slot. Only when you go CrossFire X or SLI would you lose work to the PCI slot.