Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 Review
by Ian Cutress on December 26, 2011 4:37 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gigabyte
- X79
- Sandy Bridge E
In terms of pure price, the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 sits in-between the seriously cheap mATX and ATX boards at sub $250, but below the more established price range for 'regular' X79 boards around $300-$325. As a result, the question becomes whether the GA-X79-UD3 is a cheaper regular board, or a more expensive budget board (whatever 'budget' means on X79).
First of all, the board has a variety of plus points - we have six SATA 6 Gbps ports as well as four SATA 3 Gbps ports, allowing various RAID combinations or just a simple JBOD. We have quad-GPU support via four full length PCIe lanes, labeled at x16, x8, x16, x8, but filled by the first, then the third, then the second, then the fourth, which results in x16, x8, x8, x8 operation. Gigabyte have been clever in their design, making sure that you only lose part functionality on the board (TPM, some USB headers, and two SATA ports) when a fourth GPU is added. The design is also handy for dual-GPU users with a PCIe x1 card, as the design leaves each GPU with at least one slot length of airflow.
There are some negative points as well - there are only five fan headers compared to its main competitors which have six, and these fan headers don't have the easiest or most in-depth fan control system either in the BIOS or the OS software. I also had some memory and USB issues, however that could purely be down to compatibility which could be fixed by a BIOS update. As Gigabyte are new to the graphical BIOS arena (in terms of products released with it), we may have to wait a small while for the design to mature, like ASRock's and MSI's designs have done over 2011.
In terms of performance, we are not seeing anything stellar with the GA-X79-UD3. It is functional, but does not perform at the top end of many benchmarks compared to the boards we've previously tested. On that basis, we'd have to consider the UD3 as a more expensive 'budget' board, however the auto overclock options, when they worked, gave a great combined CPU+memory overclock, bringing the board back into the game.
While X79 and Sandy Bridge-E is the talk of the performance town, the UD3 is an odd board which fits in the middle of 'budget' and 'mainstream'. It has the features, perhaps not the software or the stock performance, but X79 is still young and in a maturity phase. If it were my money on the line, it would be a hard choice between the UD3 and the ASRock X79 Extreme4. The ASRock had overclock and heating issues, but it felt a little more polished and performed better at stock. So the question becomes, do you overclock, and are you looking for a board from $235-$270? If you overclock, the Gigabyte seems the better choice.
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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...