Gigabyte X58A-UD7 Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

The south bridge chip used by X58A-UD7 is Intel ICH10R, which supports six SATA-300 ports (RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10) and all of them (blue connectors) are placed on the motherboard edge rotated 90° so video cards won’t block them, as you can see in Figure 4.

Besides the SATA ports controlled by the chipset, this motherboard brings two more SATA-300 ports and two SATA-600 ports. A pity the manufacturer decided to use connectors of the same color (white) on these four ports, which can easily make the user to connect cables on the wrong connector (i.e., you may think you are installing a cable on a SATA-600 port while in fact you are installing it on a SATA-300 port). Gigabyte should have used blue connectors on the extra SATA-300 ports in order to keep the color standard and make things easy to the user.

The SATA-600 ports are controlled by a Marvell 88SE9218 chip and they use the white connectors on the right, i. e. the connectors close to the blue SATA connectors. These ports support RAID 0 or 1.

The white ports on the left are SATA-300, controlled by a JMicron JMB363 chip, which also controls an ATA-133 port (that supports up to two IDE devices). This chip supports RAID 0, 1 and JBOD modes.

There are also two eSATA ports on the rear panel (physically shared with two USB 2.0 ports), controlled by a JMicron JMB362 chip, supporting RAID 0, 1 and JBOD modes.

This motherboard also comes with an adapter that allows you to convert up to two internal SATA ports into eSATA ports, bringing even a power connector for an external hard disk.

In Figure 4, you can see the SATA ports and a two-digit display which allows you to identify, through a two-digit code, the faulty component, in case your computer refuses to turn on.

Figure 4: SATA ports.

This motherboard also brings a floppy disk drive interface, controlled by the Super I/O chip (ITE IT8720F).

X58A-UD7 has ten USB 2.0 ports, six soldered on the rear panel (two of them shared with the eSATA ports) and four available on two headers located on the motherboard. There are also two USB 3.0 ports located on the rear connector (blue connectors), controlled by a NEC μPD720200 chip.

Three FireWire (IEEE1394) ports are provided, two on the rear panel (one standard-sized and one miniature-sized) and one through a header on the motherboard. They are controlled by a Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 chip.

Audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC889 codec, which is a professional-grade component, allowing you to professionally work with this motherboard for audio editing and conversion (e.g., converting LPs and VHS tapes to digital format) without the need of an add-on audio card. The audio section provides 7.1 audio with 24-bit resolution, 108 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the outputs, 104 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs and 192 kHz sampling rate for both inputs and outputs. Analog audio outputs use completely independent jacks, so you can hook-up an analog surround speaker system up to 7.1 without needing to “kill” the line in and/or mic in jacks. X58A-UD7 brings one optical and one coaxial SPDIF outputs on the rea
r panel.

The motherboard comes with two Gigabit Ethernet ports, controlled by two Realtek RTL8111D chips, connected to the system using PCI Express x1 lanes, which does not limit the bandwidth.