The Gigabyte X58A-UD9 Muscles its Way Into Our Lab

Power and Heat
Every piece of computer hardware draws power and generates heat [ok, ok, maybe not the case…]. This is not a problem at all, the problem comes when the draw and heat is too much. If you are pulling too much power you are often generating too much heat. This excess will lead to a shortened life span of not only the component in question but other pieces of the system. It also can cause errors, as nine-times out of ten if you are seeing odd or excessive power draw you are getting dirty power to your components. Many current motherboards have systems in place to reduce the power when there is less of a demand for it. How well these systems function are what we are looking at here for power draw.  For heat we are looking at how well the cooling system on the board can maintain stable temperatures. Of course the fact that we test in an open air environment is not always the best method for testing this. Still we can give you an idea of how well it will do at keeping the chipset and other components cool under pressure.



For power draw from the wall the X58A-UD9 was not too bad. It kept things pretty well under control. Of course once we kicked in the overclock it looks like all 24 phases were pulling the juice in and eager to supply it to the board even if it was not working very hard.

For Heat generation things were not bad either. This was very promising as we were not able to use the SilentPipe II cooler. We imagine that if we could mod that or find a Molex plug that would fit better our temps would be even lower.