GA-X58A-UD7

With their X58-UD7 board, Gigabyte’s really gone out of their way to improve on the formula established a year ago with their X58-Extreme.

For starters, the X58A-UD7 features 24-phase power, just like the P55A-UD6. This is twice the number of phases as the X58-Extreme, which was a 12-phase design, and is the most powerful X58 system on the market today.

The X58A-UD7 also supports Gigabyte’s unique Hybrid SilentPipe 2 technology. This is without a doubt, the most extreme cooling system we’ve ever seen applied to a motherboard.


For users with watercooling, the North Bridge of the chipset has a built-in waterblock. Simply attach your tubing, and you can liquid cool your motherboard’s chipset. But that’s not all. If you’d rather rely on traditional air cooling, the built-in cooling is more than up for the task. Gigabyte uses dual heatpipes to cool the system North Bridge, you’ll also see that these heatpipes are also used to cool the motherboard’s power circuitry. To keep the heatpipes cool, Gigabyte uses beefy heatsinks also.

Everything’s made from aluminum rather than copper, although this doesn’t seem to hold the board back in any way. For even more cooling, you can mount an external cooling module to the North Bridge of the chipset.


This module is massive, and includes two additional heatpipes for added cooling. These heatpipes are then flanked by two large aluminum heatsinks which have been designed with what Gigabyte calls a “convection slot” to help dissipate heat even further.

The apparatus is impressive to look at – it’s larger than some Core i7 heatsinks – and is surprisingly easy to install. All you need is a Phillips screwdriver to mount the cooler to the chipset North Bridge. Once everything’s mounted to the board it’s quite secure too. Nothing wiggles or wobbles, as everything is clamped down with screws. The cooler does partially block the uppermost x1 PCIe slot, you’ll have about 0.75” of free space between the x1 PCIe slot and the cooler, so not much room for an expansion card.

The highlight of the board though is USB 3.0 and 6Gbit/sec SATA. Because the X58 chipset has over twice the number of PCIe lanes as P55, the X58A-UD7 doesn’t suffer from the same issues as the P55A-UD6: the platform can handle it. Gigabyte uses the same NEC and Marvell controllers on the X58A-UD7, and Gigabyte includes the same high-end features that are found on the UD6 board. These features include the onboard diagnostic LED display, built-in power and reset buttons, and a button for clearing CMOS, which is located on the motherboard’s backplate (this particular feature isn’t found on the P55A-UD6 board).