Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P review

The GA-EX58-UD4P is the cheapest LGA1366 motherboard we’ve seen.

As expected, it sailed through our benchmarks when fitted with a Core i7 920 processor and 3GB of PC3-8500 DDR3 RAM. It has numerous overclocking options if you want to boost performance even further. You can adjust the voltage of the processor, memory and chipset, increase the Quick Path Interconnect (the Core i7’s equivalent to the frontside bus) by 1,200MHz and overclock the RAM to 2,000MHz. It accepts up to 24GB of memory.

The GA-EX58-UD4P is clearly aimed at gamers with its three PCI Express x16 graphics card slots. Thanks to Intel’s X58 chipset, you can install three Nvidia or three ATI graphics cards in either SLI or CrossFire mode, but one dual-core card could be faster and better value. Even if you’re not interested in games, three graphics cards would allow you to use up to six monitors simultaneously – or two in SLI or CrossFire mode.

Filling all three graphics card slots may restrict access to the other expansion card slots, though. There are two PCI slots, one PCI Express x1 and one PCI Express x4 slot. The eight SATA ports are aligned parallel to the board, which can make routing cables tidier but also makes them trickier to fit in the first place.

If you’re building a Core i7 PC and want lots of overclocking options rather than the specialist ports on Asus’s P6T Deluxe, the GA-EX58-UD4P is the motherboard to buy.