Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 Review
by Ian Cutress on December 26, 2011 4:37 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gigabyte
- X79
- Sandy Bridge E
Unfortunately with our gaming benchmarks, I came up against a small issue with the board. The first PCIe which is rated at x16 would not run in x16 mode, only giving me x8 bandwidth. After confirming with Gigabyte, this seems to be more a manufacturing anomaly than anything else. I was able to use the second x16 slot for single-GPU testing at x16, however dual-GPU testing was limited to x16/x8. Overall, this only really showed in Dirt3, as shown below.
Aliens vs. Predator Benchmark
Aliens vs. Predator is a DirectX 11 science fiction first-person shooter video game, developed by Rebellion Developments. Available as a standalone benchmark, on default settings the benchmark uses 1920x1080 with high AF settings. Results are reported as the average frame rate across 4 runs.
Dirt 3
Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters. Using the in game benchmark, Dirt 3 is run at 1920x1080 with full graphical settings. Results are reported as the average frame rate across 4 runs.
Metro2033
Metro 2033 is a challenging DX11 benchmark that challenges every system that tries to run it at any high-end settings. Developed by 4A Games and released in March 2010, we use the inbuilt DirectX 11 Frontline benchmark to test the hardware at 1920x1080 with full graphical settings. Results are given as the average frame rate from 10 runs.
Conclusions
There's nothing much special about the GPU performance, as to be expected.
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MadMan007 - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
There are other ways to implement fan control than PWM though, namely voltage control which works with any fan even 2-pin ones with no RPM sensor plus all the 3-pin aftermarket fans. Even if all it did was allow for altrered voltage, or simple software with manual profiles (ie: 'quiet' at a certain voltage' and 'high performance' at another voltage) it would be a big step up from no fan control. Of course that probably costs about $1 in additional parts so god forbid many motherboards have that.In the end it just means having to stick with a real manual fan control but it would be nice to see on motherboards.
gevorg - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
True but not all mobo manufacturers are as cheap as Gigabyte in this regard. Basic P67/Z68 mobos from Intel and Asus/ASRock have case fan controls and some even by PWM.Andrea deluxe - Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - link
http://www.techpowerup.com/157543/Gigabyte-Recalli...Andrea deluxe - Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_Wk4QWHjpcBrandenburgh Man - Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - link
It's silly to criticize Gigabyte's Multi-Threaded 3D Particle Movement score when the difference between Gigabyte's score of 898.96 and the highest score of 914.36 is less than 2 percent. In the real world, anything less than a 10 percent performance difference is unnoticeable by the user. Typically you have to get 20 to 25 percent better performance before it becomes meaningful to you, and 33 percent or better before you start getting excited about it.wifiwolf - Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - link
If you mean motherboard performance benchmarks are by far less meaningful i agree.That's because this is the less significant part in your system performance-wise, which means 2% difference overall is enough to say it's too much for an high-end.
cactusdog - Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - link
Gigabyte has recalled this board because of a too weak VRM that alows mosfets to explode when overclocking,UD3/ UD5, A1 Assassin all RECALLED by Gigabyte
rumblpak - Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - link
Shouldn't you note that they've all been recalled? Gigabyte announced a worldwide recall of all of their X79 boards.surt - Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - link
Who is buying an x79 and only getting 4 memory slots anyway? That's just crazy. If you want this platform at all, you surely want the large amount of memory it can support. If for nothing else, you can run a nice ramdisk and get things running 10x faster than the best SSD you can buy.Brandenburgh Man - Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - link
I thoroughly agree. SSDs are great for fast boot times and fast program loads, but when you really need *superfast* access to data, nothing beats a RAM drive.Although 4GB DDR3 sticks are dirt cheap right now, four memory slots only comes to 16GB. A six-core hyper-threaded Sandy Bridge E chip would quickly exhaust that if you're a power user who does a lot of video editing or transcoding while simultaneously running other programs. Even if you can afford the currently very expensive 8GB DDR3 sticks, 32GB isn't anything to brag about for a workstation class computer. Better to get a mobo with 8 slots and populate it with 32GB now, then upgrade to 64GB a year or so later when 8GB sticks becine more affordable. Then you'd have the best of both worlds, a huge RAM-disk for incredibly fast I/O, with enough system RAM left over to keep the CPU from being starved.
A few years ago Jerry Pournelle said we were entering the age of computational plenty. I like to say we're entering the age of desktop supercomputing. The future looks very bright indeed.