More Close Up Shots

The Gigabyte motherboard is packed with features and an extra, looking at the state of this preview board it’s clear that it’s as good as ready for mass production.

Attention to detail is high as Gigabyte has to catch up with Asus, Foxconn, DFI and others in the high end market. Their S775 provided excellent value for money, this time around the Nehalem platform will be less about cost saving, more about maximum performance.



Right Bottom Corner

6 x SATA2 (ICH10R)

1 X IDE

EXTREME series have Power/Reset and Debug LED



Right Top Corner

6 x DIMM DDR3

Nehalem is a triple channel design and the X58 supports up to 3 pairs of DDR3 modules



Left Top Corner

Personally I think 4-phase PWM is enough for S775, this time around Gigabyte has provided 6-phase PWM, their S775 high end boards provided 12-phase… so it’s step down, could this mean Core i7 on LGA1366 has more power saving features?



IO Interface

8 x USB 2.0

2 x RJ-45 LAN 100/1000

1 x S/PDIF Audio Out

1 x 1394/Firewire

Silver button is Clear CMOS





Following in the footsteps of other manufacturers, Gigabyte is providing plug and play water cooled chipset, and heat pipes construction to keep everything running cool and quiet;



Our last detail shot of the new LGA1366 CPU socket. The X58 specifications are not final yet, more SATA ports can be added for example; so expect some tweaks to the final product.

Even though I don’t like to change CPUs and platforms, the LGA775 platform has remained the same now for more than 3 years and change is due in order to upgrade. I’m looking forward to these triple channel multi-core systems which re-introduce HyperThreading. Interesting times ahead for hardware enthusiasts!