With both LGA1156 and AM3 scheduled for termination sooner rather than later, there’s only one safe harbor that will carry you through this year: LGA1366. Fortunately, it’s no longer a major financial stretch to get into Intel’s enthusiast socket. Yes, you can spend a massive amount of cash on a board that you can boot using the Bluetooth on your phone, but for many DIYers, $200 is the maximum they’ll spend on a mobo. Enter Gigabyte’s GA-X58-USB3. As the name implies, it’s a USB 3.0 board using Intel’s elderly but still quite capable X58 chipset. Think of the GA-X58-USB3 as a way-cheaper version of the GA-X58A-UD7 board that we reviewed in the October 2010 issue. How much cheaper? With a street price of $170, it’s literally half the cost of the UD7 and about $30 less than the Asus Sabertooth X58 board we reviewed in the Holiday 2010 issue. Gigabyte does that by shaving off a lot of the features from the UD7, such as the water blocks and massive heatsinks. The USB3 also steps back from the UD7’s 24-phase power, the onboard power switches, and POST LED. You get the point. However, as with the Asus Sabertooth X58, the GA-X58-USB3 doesn’t feel like a total strippo motherboard. There are still beefy heatsinks on the chipset and voltage regulation modules. We also like the layout of the GA-X58-USB3 board over the Sabertooth X58. With the Sabertooth X58, the sole PCI slot is covered if you insert a dual-slot GPU into the top x16 slot. With the GA-X58-USB3, you can still access the PCI slot. Only when you go CrossFire X or SLI would you lose access to the PCI slot.