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.
Value - Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item. Looking around the net we found the X58-USB3 for about $180. This is not a bad price for an X58 board and even better when you look at the performance we found with it. After all many of the boards in our testing group are more than $100 more expensive but are relatively close in terms of performance. At the price point the X58-USB3 sits at you could spend a little extra on your GPU choice and build a nicer gaming rig that you could with a more expensive board. Of course if money is no object, well you are probably going to be buying top-of-the-line products anyway so this board might not interest you. Conclusion - So while the rest of the world it talking about the P67 and the X68 and of course Computex and everything that goes with that big party we will take the time to step back and say that the X58 is far from dead. This will be good news to a great many people, and not just the people with lots of disposable income. After taking this board for a spin we feel that it is more than worth the $180 you would spend on it. Gigabyte has pulled out much of the fat in this board and managed to pull down the price as well. But in stripping off this fat Gigabyte did not kill off performance they just got rid of the items that the market they are offering the X58-USB3 to is not interested in. In a way this is a return to the way products were made a few years ago. They were not loaded up with tons of gimmicks just what you needed to get the job at hand done. We can highly recommend this board to anyone looking to get a quick inexpensive gaming/ workstation board for their 1366 Core i7 fix
