EVGA X58 motherboard is a disaster!

[Bryan Daugherty]

Some of you may remember how excited I was to enter the 64-bit i7 world (http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/what-hap...ml#post1456619). That motherboard was an absolute nightmare. It had constant problems so after talking to EVGA several times, they convinced me to do a "step-up" to the 132-BL-E758-TR board. I paid the difference and confirmed it was the retail version and waited 3 weeks while they shipped the upgrade. No cross-ship available on step-ups. Oh and I had to pay to ship the defective board back too. The step-up board arrived, I opened the box and they had sent a refurbished board with no drivers, or accessories. I emailed them and about 3 days later they responded by saying the accessories were in the mail. A week and a half later they arrived but they sent me the accessories for the original MB, no drivers, and no manual. Frustrated but tired of dealing with them I let it go. Right away the board had all sorts of issues. AHCI would not work on ports 7-9, it read my 1333 ram as 1066, and the 5th ram slot didn't work half the time so my system read as 10gig instead of 12gig. Then I got the dreaded "FF" code on the post LCD which EVGA claims is a problem with your memory or CPU not the board. After spending an hour on the phone with tech support we manually re-timed the ram and made some other bios changes and everything was fine. I loved windows 7 and the core i7 cpu especially with 12 gig of ram. This thing was a beast. About once a month the "FF" code would rear it's ugly head but I could usually get around it after shutting power off to the system for awhile and rebooting. When I called EVGA tech about it they blamed the PSU. Then last night the FF happened again with no work around. After spending 2 hrs on the phone with tech support and tearing down my entire sytem, resetting CMOS many times and pulling the CMOS battery, we finally got it to reset with everything disconnected. I then proceeded to reinstall each connection (as recommended by the tech guy) one at a time doing a post test to make sure everything was great. Fast forward 4 hrs later, everything is just about installed, except external speakers, o/s HDD, and ethernet cable. I connect the ethernet cable and boot everything is fine and then "FF". So I call the tech support back and after waiting for 20 minutes I get a tech who starts telling me to do everything I did this morning. I ask him to pull my support history and after reviewing it another 5minutes of me just waiting, he says, "Hmmm. Looks like you have a defective board. Now what you need to do is go online and request an RMA." Computer won't post and he can't issue RMA and he wants me to go online??? Luckily I still have my core 2 quad system so I requested the RMA and now I have to pay another $30 to ship my board in (with insurance) and wait 2-3 weeks for them to ship the replacement. EVGA has lost this customer for sure.

So tonight I am placing an order for a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Motherboard. I have heard good things about this but I wanted to share my EVGA experience with you guys and see if anyone had insight into this board. I am more familiar with Asus boards but the model I am interested in is too expensive this round. I have 9 SATA HDD and 1 SATA BD-re drive and need to be able to support as much of that as possible on MB as I have 2 PCI-e sata cards but they only have 3 interal connectors. This MB also supports USB 3.0, SATA 6, and is compliant with the new i7 12 core and down the road I am thinking of updating to that processor.

[Kyle Root]

I am actually considering building a system using that gigabyte mb and i7 920. Let us know how it works out. Also getting corsair 750W power, coolermaster cosmos 1000 Case, gtx 480, 12 gb ram, blu ray burner, and 2 1TB 6 GBs hds.

[Bill Sepaniak]

In case in you are interested, here is the new box I built last weekend. Easily overclocked it to to 3.85Ghz, and it is running stable on Windows 7 Pro with low temps:

Case: Antec 1200: $149.00
Power Supply: BFG 1200 watts: $149.00
Processor: Core i7 930: $199.00
Mobo: Gigabyte: EX58 UD-5: $268.00
HD: Four (4) WD Caviar Black 1 TB 64mb cache: $312.00
Optical: Lite-On DVD/CD Drive (dual layer): $27.00
Ram: Corsair 12 GB DDR3 PC3-12800 1600Mhz: $390.00
Video: Zotac nVidia GTX 285: $390.00
Cooling: Noctua NH D14: $79.00

Total parts cost: $1,963.00

It will be dual boot / dual OS. Basically, a 1 TB drive for each OS, with a little left over.

I just installed CS5 Premiere Pro and I am very happy with the performance.

[Bryan Daugherty]

Thanks Bill and Kyle. The Motherboard just arrived so now it is time to get to work on swapping it out.

[Kyle Root]

anxiously waiting to hear how the new MB worked out!

[Bill Sepaniak]

UPDATE: Added Snow Leopard via Kakewalk. The installation went without a hitch. Everything works. OSX on 1 drive, Windows 7 on another drive. I set it up so the box boots to MAC by default. During boot, Chameleon asks you if you want to boot to another drive. Hit any key to say "Yes" ... a list of your drives comes up ... scroll to the Windows drive ... hit enter ... bingo - bango ... say hello to Bill Gates.

[Bryan Daugherty]

Well Kyle, to answer your question, not well. Apparently gigabyte boards are very finicky and I am having to manually set many of the advanced features that normally I would let the bios run in auto. I am working with a tech on the tweaktown forum to try and get it set but I am less than thrilled. Don't get me wrong the features and layout of the board are great it is the bios that are less than friendly. I am giving it to the end of next week and if I am not having better luck by then it is going back to Tiger to swap for an Asus board.

[Kyle Root]

Hate to hear you are having such a time. I recently read some reviews that sound like what you are running into with the gigabyte motherboard. It makes me a little cautious about doing this build on my own. I am fairly computer literate, but the bios is an area where I haven't ever fiddled much. Hope you can get your situation worked out soon!

[Craig Coston]

Kyle,

Use an ASUS P6T based board. I am running the P6T Deluxe V2. It is an easy board to work with and it flat out works well. I have my i7 920 running stable @ 4.2GHZ on mine.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Bryan Daugherty

Well Kyle, to answer your question, not well. Apparently gigabyte boards are very finicky and I am having to manually set many of the advanced features that normally I would let the bios run in auto. I am working with a tech on the tweaktown forum to try and get it set but I am less than thrilled. Don't get me wrong the features and layout of the board are great it is the bios that are less than friendly. I am giving it to the end of next week and if I am not having better luck by then it is going back to Tiger to swap for an Asus board.

I also initially ran into a similar issue where I had to hunt for the settings in the Gigabyte motherboard's BIOS. But once I tracked the correct settings down, it's fairly easy to configure. Nonetheless, it's still not as easy to configure as an Asus or an Intel motherboard, whose BIOS menu styles are very similar to one another.

[Bryan Daugherty]

Not to get into too lengthy a discussion on the specifics but if you want to go with this board you may want to check out this forum GIGABYTE forum at Tweaktown and if you want to know specifics about the issues I am facing, you can follow along on my thread located here GA-X58A-UD3R Ver 1.0 Issues... (user name "Video Pro".)

I am underwhelmed with this board for sure. Though my scenario is most likely different since I am not starting with a clean install rather replacing a dead EVGA with the new Gigabyte board. I would consider myself an advanced user having built several systems from the ground up and modding many others before that but this one is really for expert users. Especially if you end up (like me) needing to manually override bios settings to make it all work. I will keep you guys posted on the progress.

Another thing I would recommend is using components exclusively from Gigabyte's list of compatible hardware. Both Tiger and corsair say my ram is recommended for this board but the gigabyte site does not include it in their list... etc etc.

[Bill Sepaniak]

I guess I got lucky with my Gigabyte mobo. No problems whatsoever ... even overclocking it was simple. (Of course I prefer to go in and diddle around with whatever I can ... there was even a semi-automatic overclocking template/program, but I preferred to adjust everything manually based upon several OC recipes that I had found.) Oh, if you are considering OC your board, let me know and I will point you in the direction of a great tutorial written by a Gigabyte factory engineer that goes into detail about the specifics using an i7 920 and a EX58 UD5 Extreme (the principles are the same it would give you a good starting point).

[Bryan Daugherty]

Originally Posted by Bill Sepaniak

I guess I got lucky with my Gigabyte mobo. No problems whatsoever ...

Originally Posted by Bill Sepaniak

...Mobo: Gigabyte: EX58 UD-5:..

I probably should mention here that we are using 2 different models the GA-EX58-UD5 (rev. 1.0) you are using and the GA-X58A-UD3R (rev. 1.0) are very different models and yours (from what I have read) has a better stability track record.

They are both in the same family but from what I have read there are enough differences that yours appears to be more proven. I went with this one because of the 10 SATA headers, USB 3.0, and SATA-III connections and the slots were in the configuration that suited my needs but I probably should have read more about the 2 before ordering.

[Bill Sepaniak]

Yes. They are different boards. Actually, my board is getting hard to find ... I believe it is being replaced by the EX58A-UD5. I almost got the 58A by mistake (automatically thinking since it was new, it was better). After a bit research, I learned that the 58A had more issues-w-OS X, so I looked around until I found an "old" EX58-UD5. FWIW, it works quite well with Snow Leopard, since there are a lot kexts already in place for use with it. And, I have no complaints with it using Windows 7 Pro. It is the first Gigabyte board that I have used. (Always used Asus in the past.) Hopefully, you will sort out the issues you are having. I know it can be frustrating. Good luck.

[Bryan Daugherty]

I have given it a couple weeks and many hours of my time with all the issues, I am going back to ASUS. I always had good luck with them in the past. The i7 boards they offered did not match my needs in layout or number of connections but at this point I would rather go for stability and reliability and use expansion cards to get the connections needed if necessary. I would like to get your thoughts. I am on the fence about which model to go with.

I am debating these 2

P6X58D-E
P6X58D-Premium

Are any of you using a build based on this board? If so, what are your thoughts. Have you been happy? Any major issues?

Thanks!