Layout

Gigabytes new flagship, the GA-X58A-UD9 comes with the usual color design which contains a lot of blue, white and a black coated heatpipe, that looks really awesome. The board itself shows its muscles whereever it can. Therefore we're not surprised that we find a total of seven PCI-Express slots. But generally we get the impression that the layout is a bit too crowded despite the fact that Gigabyte uses the rather unknown (but huge) XL-ATX form factor. Especially when we look at the area around the CPU socket you see that there isn't a lot of space and it also doesn't look very tidy.

Like other Gigabyte boards before the X58A-UD9 comes with a 24 phase power design which guarantees stable current supply and very good overclockability. Furthermore the 24 pahse VRM design is equipped with high quality polymer capacitors which have a life expectancy of 50'000 hours on average, low RDS(on) MOSFETs for lower temperatures and high quality inductors made of ferrite.

Totally you'll find six DIMM-slots on the Gigabyte X58A-UD9. Officially supported are DDR3-2200/1333/1066/800 with up to 24 GByte capacity.

Southbridge as well as current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via the massiv heatpipe cooling solution and you might ask yourself if such huge cooling blocks really are necessary. Never the less, the fact that the heatpipe comes with a black coating definitely makes it an eyecatcher. As an option you get Gigabytes well-known silent pipe or a water cooler between which you can choose to cool the chipset even more efficiently.