14 DAY TRIAL // Better known in the industry for its consumer products than professional motherboards, at this year’s CeBIT fair Gigabyte has presented the company’s first LGA 2011 solution designed specifically for workstation use, the GA-X79S-UD5.
Despite its model name, the motherboard isn’t actually built around Intel’s consumer X79 PCH, but is rather based on the chip maker’s C606 controller.
While at the silicon level these chipsets are basically identical, the C606 does provide users with some extra features that weren’t enabled in the consumer version of the PCH.
The most important of these is the SAS support, which provides Gigabyte’s motherboard with six SAS 6Gbps connectors to complement the usual two SATA 6Gbps and four SATA 3Gbps ports found in the X79.
Furthermore, the SAS controller embedded in the C606 silicon also adds RAID support and includes a hardware XOR processing engine.
The rest of the motherboard expansion options include five PCI Express x16 slots, two of these working at full x16 speed according to VR-Zone, a single 32-bit legacy PCI port as well as eight DIMM sockets.
Three more eSATA ports are available on the rear I/O bracket, where they are accompanied by four USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, a Gigabit Ethernet jack, and 7.1-channel audio with S/PDIF out.
A BIOS chip switch and an OC button are also strangely present, although we don’t know if the latter has any effect when Gigabyte’s motherboard is paired with Xeon E5 CPUs.
The X79S-UD5 will also ship with Gigabyte's 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 combo card, while an on-board header can provide users with two additional USB 3.0 ports.
Gigabyte hasn’t revealed any information regarding the release date or the pricing of the X79S-UD5, but Intel C606-based boards are expected to carry a significant price premium over their consumer-oriented X79 counterparts.
