Gigabyte EX58 Extreme uses Intel ICH10R south bridge chip, which supports six SATA-300 ports with RAID 0, 1, 10 and 5. In addition to these ports, it has four SATA-300 ports controlled by two JMB322 chips, supporting RAID 0, 1 and JBOD, so the motherboard has a total of ten SATA-300 ports. Another advantage of this Gigabyte motherboard is the presence of an ATA-133 port (the Intel X58 chipset does not offer one), and a floppy drive controller - both features are not available on Intel DX58SO "Smackover".

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Figure 4: SATA and ATA-133 ports.

This motherboard has two Gigabit Ethernet ports controlled by two Realtek 8111D chips, which are connected to the system using PCI Express lanes and thus able to achieve their maximum performance.

The audio section from this motherboard provides 7.1 audio, produced by the south bridge chip with the aid of Realtek ALC889 codec. This codec provides outstanding signal-to-noise ratios, with 104 dB for its analog inputs and 108 dB for its analog outputs and 192 kHz sampling rate for both inputs and outputs. In other words, you can use the on-board audio from this motherboard for working professionally editing analog audio sources, like converting LPs, cassette tapes and VHS tapes to digital format.

This motherboard has 12 USB 2.0 ports with eight of them soldered on the rear panel and four available through headers on the board. By the way, ICH10 chip has a feature called “USB Port Disable” that allows you to disable individual USB ports. This is a very interesting feature to have on PCs that are used by several different people to prevent users from installing USB devices (for example, an external hard drive or a USB drive, which can contain viruses and also to prevent people from copying data).

This motherboard has three FireWire (IEEE1394) ports controlled by a Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 chip, one soldered on the rear panel and two available via external adapters or ports on the front panel of the computer case.

In Figure 5, you can see this motherboard rear panel: PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, SPDIF coaxial and optical outputs, one FireWire port, two Gigabit Ethernet ports and 7.1 independent analog audio outputs. But what really drew our attention was the presence of a "clear CMOS" button on this panel, which left no doubt that this motherboard is aimed to overclockers.

 
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Figure 5: Rear panel of the motherboard.

This motherboard does not provides serial or parallel ports.