MaximumPC 2001 11

78 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC|JAN 2011 |www.maximumpc.com

W

ith both LGA1156

and AM3 scheduled

for termination

sooner rather than later, there’s

only one safe harbor that will

carry you through this year: LGA1366.

Fortunately, it’s no longer a major

financial stretch to get into Intel’s enthusiast

socket. Yes, you can spend a massive amount

of cash on a board that you can boot using

the Bluetooth on your phone, but for many

DIYers, $200 is the maximum they’ll spend

on a mobo. Enter Gigabyte’s GA-X58-USB3.

As the name implies, it’s a USB 3.0 board

using Intel’s elderly but still quite capable

X58 chipset.

Think of the GA-X58-USB3 as a way-

cheaper version of the GA-X58A-UD7

board that we reviewed in the October 2010

issue. How much cheaper? With a street

price of $170, it’s literally half the cost of

the UD7 and about $30 less than the Asus

Sabertooth X58 board we reviewed in the

Holiday 2010 issue. Gigabyte does that by

shaving off a lot of the features from the

UD7, such as the water blocks and massive

heatsinks. The USB3 also steps back 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 beefy

heatsinks on the chipset and voltage regula-

tion modules. We also like the layout of the

GA-X58-USB3 board over the Sabertooth

X58. With the Sabertooth X58, the sole PCI

slot is covered if you insert a dual-slot GPU

into the top x16 slot. With the GA-X58-USB3,

you can still access the PCI slot. Only when

you go CrossFire X or SLI would you lose

access to the PCI slot.

Given the very maturity of the X58

chipset, we usually don’t expect to see much

variation in performance, and we didn’t here.

For the most part, the X58 boards were within

the margin of error for the benchmarks, or so

close it really didn’t matter (hence the very

limited bolding in the benchmark chart). As it

has been, performance is not the main driver

in selecting an X58 board. It’s about features

and implementation.

That’s where we have a few quibbles

with the GA-X58-USB3. We’re not sure

what’s going on, but Gigabyte’s Easy Tune 6

overclocking app always needs permission

to launch in Windows 7. The same problem

vexed us with the UD7 board. After letting

the Gigabyte utility auto-update, it still

needed permission to run, but then would

fail to launch after the update. Fail. We rec-

ommend that you simply not install it.

As we said earlier, the GA-X58-USB3

doesn’t feel like a strippo board, but upon

closer examination, it actually is pretty well

stripped. Missing from the board are eSATA,

SATA 6Gb/s, and FireWire ports. Some of

those we can live without, but can we live

without all three? Not us. Particularly when

$30 more gets you the Sabertooth X58,

which offers the full complement of inter-

face options.

The GA-X58-USB3 is best left to budget

X58 buyers who need the better slot layout

of the Gigabyte board and have no need for

any ports other than USB. –GORDON MAH UNG

Gigabyte

GA-X58-USB3

Puts all its eggs in the

USB 3.0 basket

VERDICT

$170, http://www.gigabyte.com

7

Good slot layout;

beefy heatsinks;

low price.

No SATA 6Gb/s,

eSATA, or FireWire.

WOOKIE

GIGABYTE GA-X58-USB3

COOKIE

IN THE LAB^

REVIEWS OF THE LATEST HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE

Gigabyte’s budget board

makes some compromises,

but is fast nonetheless.

PCMark Vantage 64-bit Overall 8,930 8,827 8,993 8,940

Everest Ultimate Mem Read (MB/s) 14,668 14,310 14,618 14,628

Everest Ultimate Mem Write (MB/s) 12,078 11,962 12,076 12,194

Everest Ultimate Mem Copy (MB/s) 16,904 16,727 16,470 17,062

Everest Ultimate Mem Latency (ns) 60.2 60.4 59.8 60.5

SiSoft Sandra RAM Bandwidth (GB/s) 22.7 22.7 22.8 23

3DMark Vantage Overall 15,371 15,498 15,549 15,443

3DMark Vantage GPU 14,590 14,708 14,643 14,640

3DMark Vantage CPU 1,831 18,473 18,618 18,483

Valve Particle test (fps) 149 148 149 149

Resident Evil 5 low-res (fps) 125.3 128.0 130.1 126.7

HAWX low-res (fps) 170.0 175.0 175.0 174.0

HD Tune Pro Sustained Write (MB/s) 103.7 99.8 98.9 102

HD Tune Pro Burst (MB/s) 188.8 177.3 136.7 172

Best scores are bolded. Tests were conducted on each board using an Intel 2.8GHz Core i7-930, 6GB of Corsair DDR3/1333, an AMD Radeon HD 5850, a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black, and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional.

BENCHMARKS

Gigabyte Asus Gigabyte Asus Rampage

GA-X58-USB3 Sabertooth X58 X58-UD7 III Extreme