Over the years motherboard manufacturers have begun using more and more quality components when designing their products. This, with the evolution of more powerful and efficient cpus, has lead to amazing leaps in performance and stability. Gigabyte is no exception. As one of the most flashy motherboard manufacturers, the company is always advertising it's innovative features.



One of the company's flashiest products has to be the GA-EX58-EXTREME motherboard. Powered by the Intel X58 chipset, the board houses Gigabyte's most flashy features. Beginning with the Ultra Durable 3 pack we find out the board features 2 ounces of cooper within both the Power and Ground layers. This is used to lower system temperature by efficiently distributing heat from the critical areas throughout the entire PCB. Electromagnetic Interference is also lowered by the use of cooper and in the end results in far better overclocking.



By only using high quality solid Japanese capacitors the GA-EX58-EXTREME is guaranteed to work for at least 50.000 hours. Solid capacitors also ensure system stability and provide for more efficient overclocking.



For cooling the boards components, Gigabyte designed the Hybrid Silent-Pipe 2 technology; a features that combines the company's screen cooling technology and water cooled heatsinks for the best motherboard thermal solution. In order to exhaust the hot air formed inside the case the company uses a external heatsink placed in a convection slot at the back of the case.



Expansion slots feature five PCI Express slots (2x16X, 8X, 4X,1X), two regular PCI slots, six memory slots and 10 SATA2 connectors. The 6 memory slots can accommodate up to 24GB of memory so you're sure to be problem free for the next 3 or 4 years. There's also an IDE and floppy connector, but God know for what purpose, since I haven't used a floppy for 5 years. Let's just say that the dozen USB ports would have made up for lack of a floppy.



The board also accommodates for a lot of other common Gigabyte features like dual bios, dynamic energy saver etc.