Gigabyte EX58-UD4P

[Rob Williams]

At CES earlier this year, Gigabyte showed off two new motherboards that promised both a great value and of course, good overclocking abilities. The EX58-UD4P was one of those, and we've now been able to put it to the test. We're happy to report that as we had hoped, the board delivers on all fronts, and coupled with a reasonable price, it looks to be well-worth a look.

You can read the full article here, you can discuss it here!

[Greg King]

I liked this board when we met with Gigabyte in January and am still mulling the idea of moving to x58. The affordability of this board might pull me away from DFI. Good read Rob.

[Kougar]

I have been considering this very board. I refuse to "invest" in a $300 board when it will become horribly obsolete when SATA 6gb/s and USB 3.0 launch next year, but I still want a board without most of the corners cut.

My question is, what are the primary differences between the UD4P and UD5? It appears a different spec of capacitors are used for the CPU power delivery (entire board as well). On closer look the board still has the 2 oz copper layer, that's good as I thought it was removed. I could care less about the removed hardware RAID ports.

To make y'all work a little, I'm curious about the different choice of solid caps and what the specific difference is. The UD4P gets purple banded caps but the UD5 receives blue bands... I know this denotes the capacitor rating/specs but I haven't determined what that rating is yet. I assume higher capacitance and higher frequency response, but I dunno.

Beyond that a less extensive chipset cooler is used that also features just one heatpipe rather than two. If it was simple to do I'd just take it off and watercool everything, but since that isn't going to be possible I'd want to ensure excellent chipset cooling... how hot does the chipset get with a CPU overclock under load? Honestly the ventalation on the NB block looks to be horrible, at least the P6T had open fins! Also, does the board still require the silly CTRL+F1 to unlock full overclocking features?

I'm not even going to ask what the difference between the UD4 and UD4P are... best I can tell the UD4 lacks SLI, not sure what else.

[Greg King]

Originally Posted by Kougar

I have been considering this very board. I refuse to "invest" in a $300 board when it will become horribly obsolete when SATA 6gb/s and USB 3.0 launch next year, but I still want a board without most of the corners cut.

That's what I fear as well.

seriously 6gb/s on a sata...
people what are you transfer at 6gb/s that won't transfer at 3gb/s...

not to mention

please let me know one device that is limited by 3gb/s sata ii connection

[Rob Williams]

The UD4P, for the most part, is a slightly scaled-down version of the UD5. It loses some peripheral connectivity, including the hardware RAID and also a LAN port, and also has a less-robust cooling solution. Other than that, not too much has changed, but the board is less-expensive. As for the caps, I have no idea of the difference, and I'm not positive there is one (if someone could say for sure, that'd be great). Both boards feature UD3, and Gigabyte touts "50,000 hrs Japanese Solid Capacitor" for both of them, despite the different label colors.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

people what are you transfer at 6gb/s that won't transfer at 3gb/s...

It's not the ultimate throughput that people are concerned over (current storage solutions have other bottlenecks to worry about), but rather the much improved transactions between the drives and the Cache. Files that are larger than the Cache won't transfer faster, but files smaller than it will, and most processes that query the cache should be complete the task faster. That's not to say that the differences will be noticeable in all scenarios, but the differences will definitely be there.

We'll know a lot more when manufacturers release the first 6GB/s drives this fall.

[Kougar]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

seriously 6gb/s on a sata...
people what are you transfer at 6gb/s that won't transfer at 3gb/s...

not to mention

please let me know one device that is limited by 3gb/s sata ii connection

The Intel X25-E. They explain it best here: Link It only really matters for high-end SSD users. However, that doesn't change USB 3.0 also arrives at the same time, and there is a huge difference between 35MB/s and 400MB/s or whatever the actual number was... Please give this a read from that link:

Originally Posted by Jarred Walton

I wouldn't be surprised if there's also the old MB vs. MiB issue cropping up. Most software applications still measure megabytes as 1024^2, but hard drives measure it as 1000000. So 288MiB/s would in fact be 301,989,888 bytes per second, which fully saturates a 3Gbps SATA link. Likewise, 589MiB/s would be 617,611,264 bytes per second, so the buffer of a drive can already saturate the 6Gbps link. Of course, as someone else points out below, reads from the buffer are really a marketing gimmick. SSDs on the other had will likely top out on 3Gbps in the next year, making 6Gbps necessary for further speed improvements.

---

Originally Posted by Rob

and Gigabyte touts "50,000 hrs Japanese Solid Capacitor" for both of them, despite the different label colors.

I'm 90% sure the color denotes specifications, just like with standard capacitors and resistors. However if the board overclocked identically to the UD5, then this probably doesn't really matter... I was more concerned about the extra 2oz of copper used in the grounding layer but that seems to be part of the UD3 "spec" so most of their boards have that.

I hate to bug ya about it but you still didn't mention NB temps! Since I can't use an aftermarket NB cooler (Or NB waterblock) without the mosfets loosing their cooling I'm concerned about this. Every Gigabyte NB cooler I've had gets hot with high overclocks and a full CPU+GPU load on the system, hot enough I can't even touch it. Needless to say I only up the NB voltage to the most minimal level needed for an OC...

[Rob Williams]

I'm going to agree on the color denotations... I mean it makes sense. I'm just not sure, and I'm positive I'm not going to get a straight answer out of Gigabyte about that (we talk to their PR, not their engineers). If anyone would know this, it would probably be Matt... I'll see if I can push him toward this thread.

As for the Northbridge temps, sorry for not taking a look at that, I didn't realize it was so important. If you are considering this board and would like me to reinstall it to check, let me know. I agree though, the temps are the main issue, so I'm not sure what was at work here, the temps or not. I do know that Intel needs to work on these issues. Skulltrail's NB was ridiculously hot, and X58 isn't much better.

[madmat]

From what I saw of just looking at the board that Rob reviewed is that it's 100% solid caps. If that's the $300 board I can say that the other board most likely has normal electrolytic caps in all areas except (possibly) the CPU Vreg section. Solid caps are expensive as heck and almost all the uber expensive boards use them. They last longer, don't degrade like electrolytics do (the electrolyte dries in time) and usually have much tighter tolerances. Is it worth it? Are you wanting the best CPU OC you can get or need a PC that will be rock solid day in, day out for the next 10 years? Then yes it's worth it. If you plan to jump to the next best thing as soon as it's out then no, you're wasting money. High quality electrolytic caps will be 99.9% as good as the solid caps for a year and 90% as good for two years. So, in short it comes down to what you want, the life cycle of the PC and your upgrade path.

[Rob Williams]

Thanks for clearing that up Matt!

[Kougar]

Okay, I hate to drag this one out but all "UD#" boards feature the UD3 "spec", eg all-solid cap and two extra ounces of copper. Both boards use solid-caps, just one uses blue and other uses purple... I've observed this on past Gigabyte boards. Don't worry about it, I'll just assume the differences only affect higher frequency and maybe capacitance. As I said since the UD4P and UD5 overclocked the same it doesn't really matter, I was just curious.

And yes, those are some important key differences between solid-caps and electrolyte-caps.

[madmat]

The caps could be tighter tolerance on one board than on the other. Tighter spec parts are normally more expensive.