Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 Review
by Ian Cutress on December 26, 2011 4:37 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gigabyte
- X79
- Sandy Bridge E
3D Movement Algorithm Test
The algorithms in 3DPM employ both uniform random number generation or normal distribution random number generation, and vary in various amounts of trigonometric operations, conditional statements, generation and rejection, fused operations, etc. The benchmark runs through six algorithms for a specified number of particles and steps, and calculates the speed of each algorithm, then sums them all for a final score. This is an example of a real world situation that a computational scientist may find themselves in, rather than a pure synthetic benchmark. The benchmark is also parallel between particles simulated, and we test the single thread performance as well as the multi-threaded performance.
One of the more disappointing results by the Gigabyte board was in the 3D Particle Movement MultiThreaded result. It is comprehensively lower in this test, despite it being a wholly CPU bound benchmark. This is somewhat seen in the other multi-threaded benchmarks as well.
WinRAR x64 3.93 - link
With 64-bit WinRAR, we compress the set of files used in the USB speed tests. WinRAR x64 3.93 attempts to use multithreading when possible.
Again with this test, the Gigabyte is still behind its main competitors.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.2 - link
FastStone Image Viewer is a free piece of software I have been using for quite a few years now. It allows quick viewing of flat images, as well as resizing, changing color depth, adding simple text or simple filters. It also has a bulk image conversion tool, which we use here. The software currently operates only in single-thread mode, which should change in later versions of the software. For this test, we convert a series of 170 files, of various resolutions, dimensions and types (of a total size of 163MB), all to the .gif format of 640x480 dimensions.
Real-world single thread performance seems fine on the board though, with the Gigabyte achieving the best time we've ever seen for our FastStone benchmark.
Sorenson Squeeze 6.0 - link
Sorenson Squeeze is a professional video encoder, complete with a vast array of options. For this test, we convert 32 HD videos, each a minute long and approximately 42 MB in size, to WMV 512KBps format. Squeeze can encode multiple videos at once, one for each thread.
While for the Squeeze benchmark we have the lowest X79 result again for the Gigabyte board, this time the differences are not so large between the other boards.
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sor - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
I've had three different motherboards with realtek 8111 nics on them, all of them regularly had issues where the link would go to 100mbit or drop out altogether, which required disabling the device and then reenabling it/reinstalling the driver... almost daily. Granted, this was with Linux and the driver might not be up to par (though I used the one from Realtek's website after having issues, with no improvement), but since it's what I use at home and at work I much prefer the reliability of the Intel NIC and drivers.ET6 - Saturday, December 31, 2011 - link
You do need to have more than one Ethernet NIC on the physical computer if you are going to install Virtual Machines. For example, you could install Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V first. You could then install several VMs; one running Windows 7 with Media Center for media transcoding and content display; one running Windows Home Server 2011 as a media server etc; and maybe a third running Windows SQL Server 2008 or Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010.You need a dedicated NIC for all network communications with the management operating system incuding remote access to the Hyper-V role. The management operating system runs the Hyper-V role. This NIC should be different than any mapped to VMs.
Need at least one other Ethernet NIC to provide Virtual Machine access to an external virtual network.
Now you might have reason for 32 or 64 Gig of RAM.
zanon - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
I had thought that at this point most manufacturers would finally be moving to EFI, and that that was an important part of enabling some of these more modern GUI configs. However, you don't mention EFI at all, so does that mean these are still using legacy BIOS, just further hacked on? Or are you using "BIOS" in some generic sense? If it's the former then that's both too bad and somewhat interesting, wonder what the hold up is. If it's the latter it's confusing, please stop immediately and don't do it again.tpi2009 - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
If you read the screenshots in the second page of this review you'll find your answer.zanon - Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - link
The screenshots say alternatively "3D BIOS", "Dual UEFI BIOS", "BIOS Features" and "UEFI DualBIOS" with the article itself never referring to EFI at all. Awesome clarity and consistency there! Does "Dual" mean that it has both EFI and BIOS? Are the selectable, or is there some sort of automatic switching, or what? Or is it just stupid confusing naming?Death666Angel - Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - link
BIOS is used as a synonym for UEFI afaict. "Dual" refers to Gigabytes use of 2 BIOS chips, meaning you cannot brick it with a BIOS flash gone wrong (though I haven't seen one of those in years).AstroGuardian - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
I can't notice any performance difference from the graphs. How can you notice and how can you make such a poor verdict?RamarC - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
it wasn't a low rating... just a bit middle of the road because of the XMP issues and the price."In terms of performance, we are not seeing anything stellar with the GA-X79-UD3." so it doesn't hit the best-of-the-high-end marks but it's still a good mobo.
"If it were my money on the line, it would be a hard choice between the UD3 and the ASRock X79 Extreme4." that sounds like a mid-range endorsement to me.
So overall it seems to be a solid 'B'... you just need to see if 'pretty good' is worth your money.
PS to AT: thanks for the recent hardware reviews -- since I was getting very tired of smartphone writeups since a) I (like a lot of folks) am tied to a carrier and thus limited to their offerings, and b) I read AT for PC tech (not phone tech, and I can upgrade PC tech at my choosing.)
gevorg - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
Does Gigabyte continues to ignore the fact that their BIOS lacks basic case fan controls? Unacceptable for a $100+ mobo, let alone $250.Rick83 - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
If it where only the BIOS - It's in fact the hardware chip that's only got two PWM-able outputs...