Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 Review

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.