The inclusion of USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gb/s into the feature-sets of mid-thru-high end motherboards, have sparked off a mini wave of motherboard SKUs carved out on the basis of these features alone. Gigabyte, which recently unveiled its P55A family of socket LGA-1156 motherboards, has just done the same for its high-end socket LGA-1366 motherboard, with the introduction of the GA-EX58-Extreme2. Unlike other motherboards by the company that simply slipped in USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gb/s while retaining essentially the same component layout, the GA-EX58-Extreme2 is a completely new design, that does not look similar to that of its predecessor, the GA-EX58-Extreme.

Gigabyte made use of not one, but two Marvell 88SE9123 2-port 6 Gb/s controllers, to give out four 6 Gb/s ports (color-coded white), all internal. Furthermore, two USB 3.0 controllers have been included to provide four ports. Unlike its predecessor, the GA-EX58-Extreme2 provides four PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots (electrical x16, NC, x16, NC; x16, NC, x8, x8; or x8, x8, x8, x8, depending on how they're populated.) The CPU is powered by a 24-phase circuit, and is wired to six DDR3 DIMM slots to support up to 24 GB of memory across a triple-channel interface. The chipset and VRM cooler supports water-cooling. The rest of its feature-set remains in tune with its predecessor: six SATA 3 Gb/s ports, dual gigabit Ethernet, 8-channel audio, and support for both ATI CrossFireX and NVIDIA SLI technologies. Gigabyte may include this into the wave of products it plans to launch ahead of the winter shopping season. A video preview can be watched at the source.