Gigabyte GA-X58-Extreme motherboard outed

Yesterday ASUS showed off the P6T Deluxe X58 motherboard and today rival Gigabyte showed one of their X58 motherboards to the press in Taiwan. The motherboard on display was a dummy version of the GA-X58-Extreme, TweakTown heard the motherboard you see on the photos is not the final version. The real GA-X58-Extreme will see some changes like a different cooling setup, 12-phase power and 90-degree angled SATA ports.

The Extreme edition is mainly targeted at overclockers and high-end enthusiasts, according to Gigabyte they dropped some features like onboard RAID to focus on features for overclockers like 12-phase power and a whole load of LED indicators to assist with overclocking.

Another interesting note is that Gigabyte apparantly has no plans to use NVIDIA's nForce 200 chip to add SLI support to their X58 motherboards. Instead, Gigabyte is in talks with NVIDIA about others ways to include GeForce dual and quad graphics support. TweakTown heard how this implementation will work but unfortunately they have to keep it a secret.

GIGABYTE’s X58 Extreme lacks some features such as onboard hardware RAID and TPM (which are found on DQ6 and some other models) with the philosophy being that the Extreme range of mobos is designed purely for overclockers and high-end enthusiasts and they don’t need these extra features. They only drive up the price and may influence overclockability – and that makes perfect sense to us really.

Instead of including those features, GIGABYTE spends more money on adding extra power phases and fancy cooling and whatever other tricks it has up its sleeves to push the FSB increasingly higher. Stuff the real enthusiast will appreciate more. GIGABYTE has some nifty ideas for the final X58 Extreme but unfortunately we were sworn to secrecy but we really look forward to pushing it to the max in our OC tests later on.