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-$270? If you overclock, the Gigabyte seems the better choice.
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ComputerGuy2006 - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
Why do most motherboards on this "high end chipset" that cost 200-500$ tend to only have a single NIC... Its pathetic.The overall LGA 2011 boards are so lame for their price I did not even bother buying a new PC. I now plan on just buying a low end chipset/cpu (ivy bridge) and just paying for an extra NIC...
Metaluna - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
At least it's not Realtek. I'll take one Intel NIC over two Realtek's any day.Tchamber - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
I have a desktop, 2 laptops networked with my brother's desktop, and i don't use the two ethernet ports on my desktop, wifi for network and gigabit ethernet for file transfers to/from laptops. What else is it for?Iketh - Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - link
what?cactusdog - Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - link
Haha This board has been recalled why is it even here?? It has a problem with Mosfets exploding.shatteredx - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
I would assume that purchasers of high-end motherboards already have a router with gigabit ports, so what's the point of having 2 NICs?Another thing: people rave about the quality of Intel NICs over brands like Realtek, but I've owned both and they both performed identically (from what I observed). In fact, I would say that the Realtek NIC has a big advantage over the Intel NIC: Windows 7 can install the Realtek NIC with no driver CD but has no built-in drivers for the Intel one. This could potentially be very inconvenient the next time I reinstall Windows and can't find my mobo CD.
Metaluna - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
Realtek's drivers seem to have improved recently (especially in the Win7 era), but they have developed a reputation over the years for unreliability and inconsistent performance, especially under heavy loads. I found this out the hard way a few years ago when I installed a new home file server capable of saturating a gigabit link. Suddenly, several of the PCs on my home network (including the file server itself) started dropping off the network erratically, especially during large file copies. After at least a month tearing my hair out, I finally took a shot in the dark and put an Intel NIC in the server, and the problem vanished. The server's network port never went down again, but a couple of the clients were still having problems. I replaced those NICs as well, and suddenly I had a network again. The common thread? All the failing machines had Realtek 8111C/D chips. Remarkably the failures were consistent across different revisions of the Windows driver, and even different OS'es (Server 2003/WHS, XP, Win7)I think the reason people go with Intel is because they're about the only other option available on the market anymore. You used to see motherboards with Marvell, Broadcom, or Atheros NICs, but Realtek pretty much killed them off, and even most of the add-in PCIe cards have gone Realtek, so Intel is really the only alternative if you want to try something different. But it's pretty telling that server motherboards from the likes of Intel, Supermicro, and even Asus never use Realtek (except possibly for the IPMI port). So I'm glad to see Intel trickling back into some of the high end consumer boards.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - link
You still see Marvell in mobos now and then. The EVGA X79 SLI we use on the GPU testbed has a Marvell 88E8059.Stuka87 - Tuesday, December 27, 2011 - link
I have done some pretty extensive performance test with various NIC's out there. For basic day to day use, there is no difference. But when you start cranking up the frames per second (total throughput means nothing really, has a lot more to do with frames per second), many of the "other" brands (Broadcom and Realtec for instance) cannot stand side bys ide with most Intel NIC's. Although there are some Intel's that are not very good either.However, the point of two NIC' has nothing to do with speed typically. Yes you can bond them together, which is awesome if you are running a lot of VM's off a NAS. But its also very handy if you are on two separate networks.
Oh, and Windows 7 does have built in drivers for Intel NIC's. Where id you see otherwise? Granted they are older ones, just as the other NIC drivers are. But they function fine until you can get the latest.
Metaluna - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
Sandy Bridge boards mostly are using the new Intel 82579V chip, which from what I've read is different enough that the generic Intel e1000 drivers won't always work with it. This has been an issue with some OSes like FreeBSD 8 and VMware ESXi 5 (not sure about Linux distros).My Asus P8Z68-V uses this chip, but unfortunately I can't remember if Win7 supported it out of the box or not.