With all the news about the Z68 and P6x chipsets these days is seems that many people feel the X58 is done. Well that is not the case; many manufacturers still see this as a viable top end platform for Intel and are making some great boards for this market space. The nice thing about this is that they are not just making the high-performance/dollar products but are still working on quality boards for every price level. One of these is the Gigabyte X58-USB3. It is a mid-range board that leaves out SATA 3.0 but still keeps many of the other features you would expect from an X58 board (SLI, Crossfire, etc). Gigabyte has made sure they add in USB 3.0 for you while keeping everything around $180. Let’s take a look and see if it is worth that price.
Features -In the current market motherboard (and indeed almost all component) performance is very close. The days of a large performance advantage between boards using the same chipset are long gone. That is unless someone makes a HUGE mistake (like runs traces completely wrong). Now, the thing that differentiates different products is the features. These are things like power management, extra slots, better audio CODECs etc. It is these items that R&D teams work so hard to drop into what are really identical pieces of hardware at their most basic level. As you might expect the X58-USB3 is slim on features. Well, it is slim on high-end features. You do get some of the more common items and also some Gigabyte specific features we have them listed below.Excellent -Unfortunately there are no truly “excellent” features. We tried to find one that really stood out but for the most part all of the features of this board are fairly standard across the market.In the middle (sort of good) -On/Off ChargeCloudOCHotkeyOCSLI/CrossfireThese are what you call “value-add” features. The make the X58-USB3 a better value for having them but you are not going to buy the board just because they are there. The On/Off Charge is one that I have mixed feelings about, it is nice on the one hand but I really have not found much use for it in the real world as I would rather use my USB ports for things like HDDs, keyboards, mice and other items like that.Floor Mats -HD Audio3x USB PowerEasyTune6Smart6These are items that are found across almost all of Gigabyte’s products. We even found Smart6 on their new X58A-OC motherboard.
