Board layout

With its lower price tag, Gigabyte obviously had to make some compromises to the GA-EX58-UD3R in order for the board to hit a sub-$200 price tag. As a result, the fancy copper heatsinks and heatpipes are gone; in their place Gigabyte uses a single aluminum heatpipe to cool the North Bridge and the motherboard’s power circuitry, along with a relatively simple aluminum heatsinks. As you can see, the motherboard is cooled passively, there’s no fan needed to cool the North Bridge. A third heatsink cools the final four power phases. Down south, the South Bridge gets by with an even smaller heatsink.

We actually prefer passive cooling solutions on motherboards over active units, not only are they quieter, but you also don’t have to worry about keeping dust out of your chipset fan or fan failure.

While it may not look as intimidating as the cooler Gigabyte uses on their UD5 and EXTREME X58 motherboards, Gigabyte’s SilentPipe cooling on the UD3R does a good job of keeping the motherboard’s components cool. Even when OC’ing, we don’t feel we were held back by the motherboard’s cooling, as the motherboard ran fairly cool at all times. This is probably due in part thanks to Gigabyte’s 2 ounces of copper in the power and ground layers of the PCB, in addition Intel chipsets tend to run fairly cool anyway and don’t need the active coolers that are typically a requirement of chipsets from NVIDIA, particularly when running SLI.




As we mentioned previously, Gigabyte employs an eight phase power design on the GA-EX58-UD3R. While the eight phase power design isn’t as robust as the 12-phase power Gigabyte uses on their more expensive motherboards, it’s still enough for most users who will be OC’ing their Core i7 CPU. Unless you plan on getting really serious with a liquid nitrogen setup in order to break 5GHz, the UD3R should be able to supply enough power for most conventional CPU OC’ing attempts.


Overall the layout of the UD3R is good, but not perfect. We had no problems installing our Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme cooler along with our OCZ Reaper DDR3 memory modules, which have heatpipes that reside just above the memory modules. As you can see though, it was a close fit between the Reaper memory and the Ultra 120. We had no problems getting the CPU heatsink into the LGA1366 socket though, Gigabyte provides plenty of room in this area for large coolers.


Moving further down the board, you can see that Gigabyte provides two x1 PCI Express slots and one x4 PCIe slot, in addition to two conventional PCI slots. These are more expansion slots than you’ll find on most X58 motherboards, and by using an x4 PCI Express slot users have more flexibility when it comes to components, as x4 slots are also backward-compatible with x1 devices. (Other than Adaptec and Highpoint SATA II/SAS RAID controller cards, we aren’t aware of many x4 PCIe cards.)


Unfortunately in order to make room for all the PCIe slots, one of the x1 slots is blocked by the North Bridge cooler. You may have a hard time fitting some PCIe cards in that slot, depending on how long your card is.


Another potential issue we spotted is with the IDE connector. Gigabyte places it just underneath the X58 South Bridge. Because it’s oriented perpendicular to the edge of the motherboard, the IDE cable from your hard drive or optical drive can interfere with long dual-slot graphics cards like the GeForce 9800 GTX+ or GeForce GTX 260, impeding airflow to your card’s fan. The IDE cable could even potentially get caught in the VGA fan. A better location for the IDE connector would have been on the right edge of the motherboard, with the IDE connector oriented parallel to the right edge of the motherboard, just like Gigabyte does with the board’s eight SATA ports.


Speaking of the SATA ports, six of the ports are powered by Intel’s ICH10R chip, while the remaining two ports are powered by a SATA 2 controller manufactured by Gigabyte. These two ports are colored white.


The rest of the board’s layout is quite good. It would’ve been nice to see Gigabyte add an eSATA port on the backplate of the GA-EX58-UD3R though.