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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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.