Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P - P45 at its Finest
by Gary Key on February 3, 2009 12:15 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Final Words
The mainstream motherboard market is unbelievably competitive at this time. The breadth and quality of motherboards available in the $85~$135 price range is just remarkable. A lot of this has to do with Intel driving the P45 as the primary chipset of choice for the mainstream user, then backing it up with great processor performance and pricing to boot. AMD is finally back in the game and we will see an expanded rollout of additional performance/value based Phenom II processors shortly.
In a very crowded market space, it is critical that the manufacturers not only offer a compelling product but also back it up with top-flight customer service, technical support, and warranties. We have many compelling products available from a myriad of motherboard suppliers but what we do not have is consistent customer support.
In the effort to drive costs down and compete in an increasingly competitive market, it seems as though customer support has become a lost art. Companies like EVGA get it; they offer the best customer support and warranty in this industry. It is not always perfect, but there are actual human beings interacting with customers on a real-time basis. You might pay a little more for the product, but it is well worth it in our opinion.
We have seen improvements at ASUS, MSI, ASRock, DFI, and GIGABYTE as of late. We still think they all have a ways to go, but it is not as bad as it was a year ago. Of course, it is not as good as it should be either. We have spent the past few weeks discussing this with each company and explaining our retail experience program that is finally ready to launch. We received a mixed bag of opinions but overall the responses were positive and we truly believe each company when it says they intend to improve. We will see as time goes by.
In the meantime, we did a beta test run with the GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P. We purchased the motherboard from Newegg and tested it with the drivers and BIOS available on the website. We sent GIGABYTE's technical support group various questions over a five-week period and they came through four out of five times. This was a significant improvement over our experiences with GIGABYTE last year. We are still not thrilled with the "fill out a help ticket" and wait for an answer method of technical support. In fact, we will not be as kind in our scoring as time progresses if this does not change. Real-time chat is simple to provide if a company is willing to invest in the necessary support staff, and it can be a great help.
The website page for this board was kept up to date and driver/utility updates have been posted on a regular basis. This is a far cry from last year’s debacle with the 780G boards and we commend GIGABYTE on that improvement. We even received our rebate check within thirty days. Support in the forums is strong for this product and we see very favorable comments about it at various sites. Even if GIGABYTE trips up in technical support, we believe you can count on the user community for a solution. So enough soap box talk, what did we think about the board?
GIGABYTE has produced a stellar product when it comes to the GA-EP45-UD3P. This motherboard has a superior layout, great BIOS, incredible overclocking capabilities, high quality components, and a price that belies its feature set and performance. There are many things to like about this board but we think the layout is special. Just about every slot or connector has been perfectly placed to ensure ease of use and no compatibility problems. Even running CrossFire on the board was easy as all of the SATA ports remain accessible - granted the spacing is tight near the SATA connectors but we could still reach them with the board installed in a case.
Second up is the BIOS and overclocking capabilities of the board. The BIOS is a tweaker’s delight, yet the auto settings will allow a newbie to still extract about 90% of the board’s performance when overclocking. However, we still find ASUS' BIOS layout to be more informative and user friendly. The overclocking capabilities of the UD3P are superb and we still think there is additional potential in the board. This board is truly a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Award
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We are excited to present our Gold Editors' Choice award to GIGABYTE for their impressive GA-EP45-UD3P. Where do we start when discussing the attributes of this motherboard? Based on the Intel P45 chipset, GIGABYTE has extracted enormous performance potential from their second-generation design featuring Ultra Durable 3 technology. Impressive overclocking abilities with both dual- and quad-core processors? Check. Excellent stability and compatibility? Check. Feature laden layout and software package? Absolutely. Top all that off with technical support that actually addressed our problems. The performance of this board was consistently at or near the top of our benchmarks and ultimately offered the best overall value we have seen in this market segment.
While performance is important, ultimately the product needs to have the right feature set, stability, compatibility, customer support, and pricing. The GA-EP45-UD3P offers all of this and more to potential buyers. The UD3P offers a flexible layout, a tweaker’s BIOS, CrossFire support, an abundance of storage options, an excellent cooling solution, top-flight electrical components, very good HD audio featuring Dolby Digital Live encoding, and an extensive accessory package along with excellent documentation for about $115 with rebate.
There is no perfect motherboard, but the GA-EP45-UD3P comes just about as close to it as possible for its intended market. At least in our initial experience, GIGABYTE has come a long way in improving their customer support, website information, technical documentation, and warranty support compared to our previous experiences. We would still like to see an improvement in this area - mainly a more interactive approach like EVGA takes in supporting their customers. However, the hardware really delivers and as such we highly recommend it.
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Norm VH - Monday, August 17, 2009 - link
I am rebuilding in an old computer case using the Gigabyte EP45-Ud3P motherboard. Have new e7500 cpu. New evga 9500 Gt video card. new Corsair ddr2 ram and a new antec earthwatts psu. Before I add all the rest of the items I am checking fan features. Board lights come on. Case fans work. video card fan works. But the Zalman 9700 fan just jumps a little and stops. The Intel fan that came with the CPU does the same thing. Tried cpu fans in both cpu_fan 4 pin and the sys_fan2. Is this normal? Is the fan waiting for the CPU to heat up? I returned a motherboard to Fry's for the same behavior. They said fans should start. I tested the fans on an old asus motherboard and they are working.Isme - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
Yes On my EP45-UD3L there is a warm up time before the CPU fan needs to turn on. Its not long for most heat sinks. Maybe 5-10 seconds. You see the CPU fan twitch then sit idle for a time related to how big the heat sink itself is.For modern CPUs you should not need to worry about CPU overheat while messing around with the CPU fan unless you already have cranked voltages for extreme overclocking. The CPU should shut itself off within 10C and 30 seconds of reaching maximum normal operating temperature. I would not do any overclocking until you get fans and other basics working.
lancerocke - Friday, July 24, 2009 - link
so there is no fix for this crackling audio?i kinda want to return this board now.
Voldenuit - Tuesday, August 18, 2009 - link
Sadly, I just got an EP45-UD3P Rev1.1, and the onboard audio still crackles. :(Running Win7 Ultimate RC.
syseng - Friday, June 12, 2009 - link
My second Gagabyte board of this model has died. The first one was DOA and this second one died more gradually. The problem is that it woudl sometimes refuse to turn on or off with the power button. Pressing the button mutliple times or holding it in sometimes worked. Finally, it would not power up at all. I have grounded the pin 16 of the system power connector to start and run the system until I can get a replacement. I have read many comments from varous forums of people having power control problems with this board. Mine was never over-clocked and no power management control was on.Gigabyte will not ship a replacement until they receive the dead board and test it. Estimated round trip time to get the board back is about 3 weeks. Probably the last Gigabyte for me. When I built this system in March, I ordered a Gigabyte 4850 graphics card (all from Newegg) and it was DOA too.
I am just wondering if I am incredibilty unlucky with Gigabyte or if they really have a quality problem. They certainly have a customer service problem if they think it is acceptable to have a system down for 3 weeks.
keithh - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 - link
I decided to give Gigabyte a shot for my latest system build and purchased the EP45-UD3L for the kid's linux desktop. I was using a PATA DVD drive to install to an older IDE HD. After the installation started, the system abrupty died. After resetting, the bios was unable to see the drives. Cutting a long story short, I concluded that the motherboard was bad and exchanged it.The second board had exactly the same problem.
After switching to an ASUS motherboard, I had no problems.
I eliminated the following possibilities during my investigation:
- master/slave settings
- IDE cable
- DVD drive
- IDE drive (tried a SATA drive from another machine)
- RAM test
- BIOS revision (F2 -> F4 didn't make a difference)
- installing Windows XP from a disk that is known to be good
- installing two different Linux distributions including Fedora 10.
It uses the JMicron 368 PATA chipset which has a dodgy reputation so conceivably using a SATA DVD drive and a SATA HD would have worked.
The power supply was a brand new Corsair.
That doesn't leave a lot of room for interpretation - I was 0/2 on the Gigabyte MB. I wasn't impressed.
syskin - Saturday, February 21, 2009 - link
Hi, I have one question which is very important to me.If I:
- overclock FSB and
- set a higher Vcore voltage and
- activate EIST/speedstep,
...will this motherboard still lower Vcore at idle (as per speedstep) or will it keep it at bios setting all the time?
Thank you in advance.
foofoo - Tuesday, February 17, 2009 - link
I have 2 x 2GB RAM installed and winXP pro 32 bit only sees 2.5GB. The BIOS (f7) sees all 4GB. Changed RAM and slots with the same results. I put in a trouble ticket to Gigabyte support and got the following response (or non-response)"You will need to use 64 bit OS in order to see the full 4gb capacity or higher
Windows will automatically reserve an certain amount of memory being used and there are no way to adjust it"
All other gigabyte boards that I have used (965 and P35 chipsets) show 3.5GB with 4 installed under XPpro. This is actually a game stopper for me since losing that much RAM affects the usefulness of my PC.
Fair warning for all wanting to use a 32 bit OS with this board.
Isme - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
Make sure you are looking at BIOS RAM reports especially the POST. Or I'd use the Task Manager Physical Memory report or the built-in Windows Accessories-System Tool-System Information-System Summary tab-Total Physical Memory line before I panic about hardware issues. Note that on one of my computers I have only 1.19GB available out of 2029MB. Application reports of RAM are pretty much useless except for that application at that point in time with whatever else happens to be running. Know how 3rd party utility tools define available RAM.Well the amount of RAM visible varies. Depending on OS and reporting tool 1GB may be reserved for the OS. That is the standard 32-bit Windows OS only has 3GB RAM for user purposes. With older very basic peripheral devices and XP that often included memory mapped IO space. But with newer larger OSes and huge numbers of motherboard ports and video cards sporting 1GB+, dedicated SATA port buffer frames, dedicated buffers for fancy network ports...
Remaining RAM space, especially user space, may be more dependent on how much of the 4GB space is mapped for peripherals in your particular setup. I would not be surprised if some video cards are mapping 512MB or more to main memory as a window now that 1GB+ video cards are common. I suppose a less considerate video BIOS might even automatically reserve space for an X-fire setup even if you are not using one.
pudlglum - Sunday, February 15, 2009 - link
Thanks for all the excellent knowledge on the AnandTech Forum. I believe this is my first post on any forum, and I've been into PCs since purchasing my brand new Compaq Portable 286, with 256K ram and a single 1.2 Mb floppy.I've had a GA-EP45-UD3R running for about a week. All components are conventional, all good quality, nothing is "bleeding edge", and I'm not overclocking. I have an ATI Radeon HD 4350 PCI-e graphics card, connected to a Hitachi CM751 CRT monitor. Two WD SATA hard drives are connected to the Intel (yellow) connections, configured in the BIOS to IDE mode. My reliable Plextor PX-760A CD/DVD burner is connected as "master" to the single IDE connection.
Everything was smooth except for two things: occasionally the screen resolution was corrupted when resuming from standby, and I was getting disk write failures from both an old (4X) CD burner and my recent Plextor PX-760A CD/DVD burner.
I downloaded whatever recent drivers I could find; the video problem hasn't recurred, but ImgBurn or CDBurnerXP both froze while attempting to write an iso image (Windows 7 Beta) to a DVD. ImgBurn locked both itself and Explorer, and required a forced reboot. CDBurnerXP Pro provided the following error message:
Writing Error: (3) Error occurred writing data to disc.
The SCSI/ATAPI bus was reset and caused a write failure (1026).
Error Sense Data: SENSE KEY: 6 ASC: 29 ASCQ: 0
Apparently both IDE and the purple SATA2 connectors are controlled by the "Gigabyte SATA2" chip, enabled in my BIOS in IDE mode. It is listed in the Device Manager "SCSI and RAID controllers" section as "GIGABYTE GBB36X Controller", with driver provider "JMicron Technology Corp". I was distracted by several suggestions that the JMicron driver was buggy, but that was just a wild-goose-chase.
I then pursued some marginal comments about DPC latency. The comments were typically in the context of audio crackling issues, which I had not (yet) noticed. However, several posts also referred to the Gigabyte Energy Saver service. I had not knowingly installed that package from the Gigabyte motherboard CD, but I found the GSvr.exe service running, with description "GEST service for power management". It also appeared in my Start menu, under GIGABYTE > EnergySaver.
I downloaded DPC Latency Checker V1.1.0 and discovered that my latency was averaging around 500µs, with all "foreground" applications closed, and with Windows Desktop Search and Avast Antivirus disabled. Running ImgBurn in this condition resulted in a another DVD coaster.
After hard-rebooting, I disabled the GSvr.exe service, and confirmed that the DPC latency dropped to around 5µs. This time, ImgBurn successfully wrote the iso file to the DVD (yay!).
I have now uninstalled GSvr.exe (GIGABYTE > EnergySaver > Uninstall), and re-enabled Windows Desktop Search and Avast. In the last half hour or so, my DPC Latency has continued to average about 5µs, with an absolute maximum of 177µs. I suspect removing the Gigabyte EnergySaver service will solve both my disk burning and standby/wakeup problems.