Here we have a close up of the X58 chipset, also known as the IOH (In/Out Hub) controller - No IHS, so be careful when fitting those after market coolers!
Also, keep in mind that the memory controller no longer lives here and is now situated directly on the CPU and that frees up the IOH to more efficiently process other tasks (see chart below).
As you can see from the chart, what used to be the North Bridge is now the IOH (In/Out hub) and that has two primary functions, the first is to connect the
PCI-E bus to the processor and there are 36 lanes available (each at 500MB/sec) in a variety of configurations - the most common is going to be 16x/16/4x and that will allow for SLI/Crossfire and maybe a Physics card, although it should be noted that other, on-board features such as the hardware
RAID and LAN teaming will eat into this bandwidth.
The second of the primary functions of the IOH is to connect the South Bridge (ICH10R) to the CPU at speeds of up to 2GB/sec.
There are twelve possible USB 2 connections which feature
dual EHCI which should mean that the twelve USB 2 connections should be split between the two EHCI controllers giving around 480 MB/sec to each set of six.
There are six
PCI-E x1 lanes available as well as dual gigabit LAN.
We also have Intel's tried and tested
High Definition Audio, 6
SATA 2 ports, Intel Matrix Storage Technology (
RAID) and
Intel's Turbo Memory feature with user pinning.
The main link between the IOH and the processor is now called the QPI which is Intel's Quick Path Interconnect Architechture and that will transfer data at a massive 25.6GB/sec.
Another groundbreaking feature of QPI is that each processor now has it's own dedicated scalable memory instead of competing for it via the
FSB and memory controller. Should the processor need to access the memory of one of the other processors, it can access it directly via the QPI bus resulting in much less bottlenecking and faster number crunching.
A whopping 10
SATA II slots - Six of the slots plug into the ICH10R and the remaining four plug into a pair of Jmicron controllers which will allow Hardware
RAID modes 0 & 1. This is an interesting approach by Gigabyte, although I would have liked to have seen at least
RAID 5 thrown into the mix to make it a bit more useful.
The EX58-Extreme features six memory slots which means you can run triple channel memory using three or six DIMMs. You can also run standard double channel if you like, or even single channel if you're feeling really old school
There's also the opportunity to run DIMMs that have different timings, although how well this will work in practice is another matter.
Directly below the memory slots in the pic below, you can see the on board power switch and then just below that is a much smaller reset switch.
The placement of these switches looks odd at first, but most people that will be using these will be doing so without a case so accessibility isn't a problem really.
Along the lower part of this photo, there are a number of LEDs, these are to indicate the amount of phases being used and we will have a closer look at these later in the review.
Next, the BIOS...
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Please do not go poking around with a DMM unless you know what you are doing, you can easily damage or kill your board if you do it wrong and I take no responsibility for any damage as a result of using these images.
