Legit Reviews

IDF 2011: GIGABYTE X79 Motherboard Preview

Since not everyone is able to make it to IDF 2011, we are bringing it to you. While we're at the Intel Developer Forum we had the chance to sit down with GIGABYTE. The had a couple of their Intel X79 on display for all to see. The motherboards that GIGABYTE had on display ranged from mild to wild! What were they showing off at IDF 2011? Read on to find out!



Article Title: IDF 2011: GIGABYTE X79 Motherboard Preview
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1711/1/

Cool, looking good, but:

1) PCI-E layout is STUPID!!!! If you are running 4 dual slot cards, you have no PCIe X1 slots open! It would have been better to switch the order.
2) Is there any reason for the location of the DIMM slots?
3) WHY would ANYBODY need 14 freaking SATA ports? If you were going to run a massive RAID array, you would want a dedicated RAID card anyway. and also, somebody name a case you can fit 14 drives into please!

On the GA-X79-UD7, what are those two connectors near the SATA ports!?! (One is between the ATX power and nearest 90* SATA ports and the other is near the bottom of the board.

JPEGONE42 wrote:Cool, looking good, but:

1) PCI-E layout is STUPID!!!! If you are running 4 dual slot cards, you have no PCIe X1 slots open! It would have been better to switch the order.
2) Is there any reason for the location of the DIMM slots?
3) WHY would ANYBODY need 14 freaking SATA ports? If you were going to run a massive RAID array, you would want a dedicated RAID card anyway. and also, somebody name a case you can fit 14 drives into please!

3) If you want raid, you will obviously use SSD drives and 2 SSD's can fit in place of a regular HDD, so yes you can. My case has a space for 6 HDD's (that's 12 SSD's) and all new optical drives also use SATA connections (add 2 optical drives and you have your 14 SATA )

gwolfman wrote:On the GA-X79-UD7, what are those two connectors near the SATA ports!?! (One is between the ATX power and nearest 90* SATA ports and the other is near the bottom of the board.

It is a SATA power plug to deliver power to the PCIe x16 slots

XstollieX wrote:

gwolfman wrote:On the GA-X79-UD7, what are those two connectors near the SATA ports!?! (One is between the ATX power and nearest 90* SATA ports and the other is near the bottom of the board.

It is a SATA power plug to deliver power to the PCIe x16 slots

Interesting. It looked like SATA but it was too wide for the data cables though; never though of it being power.

XstollieX wrote:

gwolfman wrote:On the GA-X79-UD7, what are those two connectors near the SATA ports!?! (One is between the ATX power and nearest 90* SATA ports and the other is near the bottom of the board.

It is a SATA power plug to deliver power to the PCIe x16 slots

Makes sense if it does away with having to have 6 pin plugs strung to your cards.

JPEGONE42 wrote:...somebody name a case you can fit 14 drives into please!

Off the top of my head for traditional 3.5" drives... LIAN LI PC-A70F (well most if not all Lian Li super towers), Silverstone RV03B-WA, Fractal Define XL

Kaos Kid wrote:

XstollieX wrote:

gwolfman wrote:On the GA-X79-UD7, what are those two connectors near the SATA ports!?! (One is between the ATX power and nearest 90* SATA ports and the other is near the bottom of the board.

It is a SATA power plug to deliver power to the PCIe x16 slots

Makes sense if it does away with having to have 6 pin plugs strung to your cards.

Board makers add these, molex connectors, & PCIe connectors to lessen the load on your 12v & 3.3v wires coming from the 24pin connector.

There's many cases where the 24pin connector melted on a board because of a 4 x GPU config on a board. Since there's only 2 12v sources to supply 300w of power to the PCIe x16 slots. (Since an x16 1.x slot is supposed to supply 75w of power, 4 x 75 = 300)

"The GA-X79-UD7 has fewer SATA ports than the boards that we have already looked at, only ten SATA ports this time."

I could be imaging it, but I count 14 in that picture

billybob2010 wrote:"The GA-X79-UD7 has fewer SATA ports than the boards that we have already looked at, only ten SATA ports this time."

I could be imaging it, but I count 14 in that picture

might be a typo... eight of the ports are coming off due to Intel yanking them for two reasons... Low yields and SAS compatibility issues.