On-Board Peripherals
Contents
The Intel X58 chipset is a dual-chip solution, using the ICH10R south bridge chip. This chip supports six SATA-300 ports (with RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10). These ports are located on the corner of the motherboard rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them. This motherboard doesn’t come with SATA-600, ATA-133, nor floppy disk ports.
Figure 4: SATA-300 ports
This motherboard has 10 USB 2.0 ports, six soldered on the rear panel and four available through two headers located on the motherboard. This motherboard comes with two USB 3.0 ports soldered on its rear panel, controlled by a NEC μPD720200 chip. No FireWire ports are available.
The X58-USB3 comes with eight-channel audio, generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC892 codec. Unfortunately Realtek doesn’t publish technical specifications for this codec at their website. The portrayed motherboard comes with an on-board coaxial SPDIF connector, and you can either install an optical SPDIF connector or route digital audio to your video card to have digital audio on the HDMI connector using the available “SPDIF_I” header.
The analog audio jacks are independent, meaning that you won’t need to “kill” the mic in or the line in jacks if you install an analog 7.1 speaker set.
The portrayed motherboard has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by a Realtek RTL8111E chip, which is connected to the system using a PCI Express x1 lane and thus not presenting any potential performance issues.
In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rear panel, with keyboard and mouse PS/2 connectors, coaxial SPDIF output, six USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, one Gigabit Ethernet port, and independent analog 7.1 audio outputs.
Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel
Like most motherboards from Gigabyte, the X58-USB3 comes with two BIOS chips, allowing you to recover your BIOS if the contents of the main chip are destroyed by a virus or a bad BIOS upgrade.
Figure 6: Dual BIOS
In Figure 7, you can see all the accessories that come with this motherboard.
Figure 7: Accessories
