Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5P X58 motherboard review - 1 - Introduction

November 2008 definitely started with a bang. There's no doubt that Core i7 is going to change your overall PC experience now and in the future. There's still a lot ahead of us for 2009. We'll see many more processors based on Core i7, more chipsets and obviously AMD will come back to the scene with a reaction to this new technology as well. But for now we'll stick with what we have at hand and if you get to purchase a Core i7 processor .. you still need to make a decision on what kind of motherboard you are using. My recommendation: shift through some of our Core i7 articles. We already tested several ASUS X58 mainboards, the Intel reference mainboard, we have an ECS motherboard inbound and this review will cover the GA-EX58-UD5P motherboard from the funky blue colored people at Gigabyte.

For those of you who missed the little bomb that Intel dropped earlier on, X58 is the enthusiast high-end chipset for motherboards. Enthusiast also means expensive and I won't lie to you, it would make more sense to just sit it out and wait for cheaper chipset to arrive.

Yet for those who want the best, feature rich and fastest and that have some money to spend. Well, X58 is the way to go. Much like their competition Gigabyte will offer a very versatile, tweakable and feature rich motherboard. This motherboard also comes with full SLI certification, up-to three cards. It's really one amazing little piece of art.

Let's head onwards to the next page, slip a Core i7 965 processor into this motherboard  and startup this review, shall we?