Gigabyte's EX58-Extreme pictured

Gigabyte already showed a prototype of its High-end Nehalem motherboard, the EX58-Extreme in August. Since then, the company has made several alterations to the design, as well as giving a big make-over to the cooling construction. The XtremeSystems forum now shows pictures of Gigabyte's finished product.

The EX58 is built on the X58 chipset and features a double 6-phase power provision for the processor. There are six DDR3 memory slots which allow for triple-channel configurations. The chipset features a large cooling system, consisting of two large aluminum blocks that are connected to the chipset through heatpipes. The end of the cooling expands beyond the PCI-bracket, thus allowing for extra cooling outside of the case. Gigabyte also uses this design on its passively cooled graphics cards. 

The ICH10R southbridge also features a large cooling block, which reads the text Ultra Durable 3. This means that Gigabyte has designed the board for maximum cooling and stability. Another thing that shows we're dealing with a high-end motherboard are the 10 angled SATA connectors, they are placed at an angle to prevent any problems with large graphics cards. The board has a total of three PCI-Express 16x slots of which only the blue ones feature 16 lanes. There's also two regular PCI slots, an IDE connector and room for a number of USB headers.

The board's backplate has the conventional USB ports, 7.1 audio (analog and digital), and PS/2 connectors, as well as Firewire and 2x Gigabit LAN. When the board will become available and how much it will cost is still unknown.

Image source:  Techpowerup