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.
The Test System and Comments -Our test system is built on an open bench. This has two effects on testing. First it allows us to see everything and also to setup and disassemble the test rigs quickly. Second it means that we cannot gauge the potential air flow found in a normal case. The air is pretty stagnant; some may say this is a great neutral testing method and it can be. However, it does mean that the temperature reading taken off of the components are not accurate to what an average consumer would see. This means that your thermal performance will vary from what we see here.
Setting up the X58-USB3 was as simple as any other modern motherboard. You drop in the Windows 7 (or XP) install disk and you are off and running. Gigabyte’s new installed gets you all of the drivers in one go and at the end of that offers and option to install all of the utilities.
Speaking of Utilities there are a couple that I will touch on briefly. One is the Smart6 Suite. This is a compilation of products that include a user management software (Smart TimeLock) a backup utility (Smart Recovery) and a couple of other nice items.
The second one is the Dynamic Energy Saver 2. This is a pretty cool piece of software (if you are not overclocking). It is capable of dynamically adjusting the power phases as needed for almost every item installed. Of course there will be some items that it cannot control (items from other manufacturers etc).
