GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD7 (X58 Express) Motherboard
Final Thoughts
The GIGABYTE X58A-UD7 is a nice board. It looks cool in your system (if you have a window) and is clearly capable of some good performance. However, we did not see that on the bench. But, I would not give up on the X58A-UD7. According to the overclocker "Hi Cookie" there is a new BIOS on the way that greatly improves performance with the 32nm Gulftown CPU. At the time of testing (and writing) we did not have access to this BIOS, but we do hope to return to the X58A once it is out and see what we find.
Overall, we found the X58A-UD7 to be a well-rounded board. The inclusion of dual GBe LAN ports, SATA 3.0 (With RAID), XHD RAID, USB 3.0, multiple choices for cooling the board, 24-power phases and a great overclocking utility (EasyTune 6) make it an excellent choice as long as you are not looking to drop a Gulftown CPU in there right away.
We do hope that the F7 BIOS that is in the works will correct the performance issues we saw with our synthetic tests, but as not a ton of people are going to be dropping the $1000 Core i7 980X into this board we can feel fairly confident that it will do what you ask it to. Considering the $350 price tag at NewEgg.com, we think that the X58A-UD7 certainly should be doing that.
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