ASUS & Gigabyte X58 Motherboard Roundup - PAGE 1

ASUS and Gigabyte are two top-tier motherboard manufacturers that together control a very substantial portion of the motherboard market. There is good reason for this, as both create top of the line motherboards that range from budget entry level offerings to the more extreme enthusiast grade products.

Gigabyte’s high-end products come packed with all the latest features of the day and utilize their Ultra-Durable 3 design, which uses 2oz of copper PCB in both the ground and power layers, as well as includes a very robust VRM with a high level of phase units. Additionally Gigabyte also includes a very efficient passively cooled heatpipe heatsink to cool all the critical portions of the motherboard. All of this greatly improves the quality of the motherboard, but it also increases its longevity and enhances the boards overclocking capabilities.

Like Gigabyte, ASUS also includes a wide array of features on their boards, but it is the ROG line that comes packaged with all the latest and greatest technologies. These included easy access on-board switches to stop any voltage traveling from the power supply to the CPU in case of processor failure during extreme overclocking, ROG connect for plug-and-play overclocking and BIOS flashback. So, you can see that each of these manufacturers pull out all the stops when it comes to their enthusiast grade products.

In this round-up we are going to be reviewing three separate motherboards, each using the high-end Intel X58 chipset. Two of the motherboards are manufactured by ASUS, with one fitting into the ROG series, and the third is from Gigabyte. Each board comes packaged with features that make them unique, but some of the biggest changes to these boards is the added support for USB 3.0 and SATA 6G. These technologies can increase the overall performance of a product when used in conjunction with a supported device, so these boards add some future proofing over previous Intel X58 models.

It is going to be very interesting to see if one of three high-end motherboards can stand-out from the competition as we are placing them head-to-head in our tests of synthetic and real-life benchmarks.