Gigabyte X79-UD3 Motherboard Review

Intel S2011 by leeghoofd @ 2012-05-01

Even though main focus is lately on Ivy Bridge, let's not forget about Intel's High End range based on the X79 chipset. One of the main drawbacks of Socket 2011 is the total platform cost. Besides the quad core i7-3820, the hexacores versions cost a pretty penny. On top of that, most of the X79 mainstream boards are far from cheap. Prices of 250 euros and more are pretty common. Luckily for us Gigabyte and ASRock have got 'let's call them a more" budget friendly motherboard in their X79 lineup. Gigabyte's type numbering has always been kept pretty simple. Today's UD3 board is the entry board for their limited socket 2011 series. Limited, because Gigabyte only has got 3 boards left in the X79 range : the UD3, UD5 and a gamer orientated G1 Assasin 2 board. The X79-UD7 board has been EOL'ed. And till now there's still no sign of the X79-UD5 S(erver) version. But does a "cheap" board mean that the quality or performance is inferior ? Time to find out what this X79-UD3 has got in store for us.

Introduction

We must applaud the effort from both Gigabyte and ASRock to be able to produce an X79 chipset motherboard at this price level. Both manufacturers skipped the 8 dimm slots and opted for just 4 slots. While this might sound as a drawback, you are still able to equip these boards with up to 32GB of ram. Which is more than plenty for most enthousiast users. For those that want even more RAM, they probably won't even think of buying one of these entry models and opt straight for a server or a more expensive variant. The UD3's box is pretty small in comparison with the UD5 and 7 board. Just the bare minimum is included, nothing fancy as extra USB3.0 ports, WIFI antennas or other sortlike accesoires.

This ATX sized board is 4 way SLI or 4 way CrossfireX compatible. Yes you read it correct, this little baby can house up to 4 GPU's. All the SLI and Crossfire bridges are included in the package. Pretty darn good value not ?

Once you go black you never go back, Gigabyte's X79 offering looks very classy with it's black PCB. The dark grey heatsinks and black plastic really give it that pro look. Of course this adds zero to the performance, but some people buy certain boards just based on their looks.

The UD3 boards sports a 8 Phase power design, luckily Gigabyte didn't do any cutback in the PWM department and equipped this board with high quality POScaps and PowerPAK mosfets. On the bottom left picture you can cleary see the 4 DIMM slots, supporting out of the box max 2133Mhz RAM. But via overclocking you can go up higher in memory divider. Noteworthy a pretty clean socket, so very easy to insulate for those that want to bench on this board.

Weirdly enough the UD3's PWM heatsink is better dimensioned then the one we found on the UD5. To be honest the UD5 heatsink looked quite flimsy. Okay the latter was connected via a heatpipe to the PCH heatsink. But this reviewer has never been a big fan of heatpipes for cooling chipsets.

X79-UD3 on the left, UD5 on the right.

The PCH chipset is uber dimensioned and sports a very nice design. But besides it's looks, it got barely warm during SLI testing.

The chipsets are screwed down for a rock solid mount, no fragile push pin system. Job well done Gigabyte.

More Details

The Intel X79 chipset was a bit dissapointing in the storage department. Early promises weren't adhered too and we have to settle with 2 x SATA 600 and four SATA 300 ports. Normally this would suit most users, but most vendors add at least one or more Marvell chips for added storage support via more SATA or eSATA ports.

Besides the 14 X79 chip supported USB2.0/1.1 ports, the extra USB 3.0/2.0 ports are powered by two Fresco FL1009 chips. The LAN chip is supplied by Intel, with 10/100/1000 Mbit speeds.

The backpanel still houses a PS2 for either a keyboard or a mouse. The Intel GbE LAN, optical and coaxial S/PDIF OUT connectors and finally 6 audio jacks powered by a Realtek ALC898 Codec. The Realtek AUDIO chip on this board supports up 2/4/5.1/7.1 channel and Dolby Home Theater sound. Dual AMI EFI biosses on this board, so there's always a working version available in case of a bad flash or a corrupt bios.

Bios Screenshots

Gigabyte has worked hard to update their bios to a more flashy version then eg on P67. While ASUS and other brands were already doing fine with their EFI biosses with Sandy Bridge, this Gigabyte version remains a bit sluggish. Really weird as this is the high end X79 lineup. We had major issues with the Logitech MX518 on the UD3, 5 and 7. Also changing values in the bios is far from user friendly. The mouse is practically useless as most settings have to be altered and confirmed by the keyboard. Luckily the Z77 boards' biosses got a major overhaul. One of the few flaws of this UD3...

Software

3DPower : Gigabyte has included the 3DPower Windows software to be able to control the PWM and Memory power delivery. The UD3 has a new Digital PWM controller, plus a digital memory controller. The latter can adjust not only the memory, but also the VTT and VSA voltage. The 3DPower software has got the tweaking enthousiast completely covered. But there's even more software to use...

Easytune : The renown Easy tune is still present in the Gigabyte software bundle. We tried the three OC profiles ( 4.1 - 4.3 and 4.5GHz ) and only the first two worked flawlessly without manual intervention. Issue is that the Loadline setting is not altered. The Vcore set by Easytune at 1.35Vcore was not enough after Vdroop/drop to keep the 3960X CPU Prime95 stable. By adjusting the Loadline setting we got it stable. Out of the box it would not run on our ES CPU.

Touch Bios: Touch bios is also not new and was already included with the Z68 series. However Gigabyte must ensure if they release a board, bios or software, that everything works accordingly. Many false setting readouts in the Touch Bios. Plus adjusting memory timings sometimes resulted in a no post. While adjusting manually the same settings straight in the bios it booted up fine. One of the reasons most enthousiasts use the bios instead of some buggy software...

Results Part I

TEST SETUP:

Gigabyte X79 UD3 (F7 Bios)
ASUS Sabretooth (0906 bios)
Intel Siler DX79SI (0424 bios)
Gigabyte X79 UD5 (F9a bios)
MSI GD65 8D ( 1.2 bios )
Intel i7 3960X CPU @ 4500mhz
Corsair H100 Cooling
GSkill 16Gb 2133Mhz C9 kit
ASUS GTX480 ( SLI ) 285.38 drivers
Western Digital 1Tb Caviar green HDD
Corsair 850TX PSU

Our test suite always starts off with for some two outdated benchmarks. SuperPi is just a single threaded that relies heavily on raw CPU power and bandwith. An excellent test to highlight instruction per clock efficiency. Wprime32 is multithreaded and heavily stresses all the available cores. Both tests are not considered as stability tests, but they already give a pretty good indication, if they pass flawlessly, that you are on the right track. The Pi 1M and Wprime 32 are very fast tests and over in a matter of seconds and we observe the little UD3 just taking the lead in Pi and shared first spot with the MSI GD65 8D. Note that all results are the best out of 3 runs. Don't expect to see any big performance differences as all boards are based on the same Intel X79 chipset. Bios optimisations are not done :we only set 45 x 100 Bclock, ram to 2133Mhz 9-11-10-27 1T ( no subtiming tweaking ) and finally the appropriate voltages for CPU and RAM. The board's bios has to take care of the rest.

The longer versions of the test highlight bios implementations by the bios engineers. The Pi 1M and Wprime 32 version are close to 100% relying on the CPU power. With the extended versions ram subtimings, power delivery and co start to matter. And as usual ASUS does a fine job there, but there are no world shocking performance differences.

The Gigabyte X79-UD3 board stays well in front of the pack during our 2D test. So don't get fooled by it's low price. This board seems pretty well dialed in and is ready to serve s a stable platform for your next build.

In both of our Maxon's Cinebench tests the UD3 stays ahead of the competition and it's bigger brother the UD5. The differences however will not be noticed during daily work or usage...

In the rest of the multi-threaded suite, the UD3 is right in front. Not really the position where you expect the cheapest board of the here tested X79 boards to be at. This little UD3 is a really nice performing board.

Results Part II

The 2D performance was excellent, let's see if the UD3 can hold off the competition in the 3D test suite.

In the two Futuremark 3D synthetic tests, the UD3 has to give way to the MSI and ASUS board. But the few points that seperates the highest score and the worst score is well within the margin of error.

We see a similar outcome for our game tests. It really doesn't matter which X7 board you opt for. Performance is similar, no matter the brand, version, type... Final decision will be made on features, looks and most important of all the price. The latter one of the strong points of this UD3 board.

We added a second Fermi GTX 480 for some SLI action. Sadly we only have two left, otherwise it would have been possbile to test the 4 way SLI action. Which is perfectly possible on this little board. Really cool, as most quad SLI ready boards are E-ATX size. The UD3 packs it all in a normal ATX PCB. The scores are pretty close again. Nothing more to add...

Conclusion

We were pleasantly surprised with the Gigabyte X79-UD3. Maybe because it co-operated flawlessly during our test runs. The UD5 sample that was tested at the [M]lab was far from. Refusing to post when changing a lot of values in the bios, bios corruptions, you name it , the UD5 challenged us big time. Bios updates got rid of most issues we encountered, but it left a bad taste in our mouth. Luckily for the UD3, even with the early biosses, it was a pleasure to work with. No endless bootloops, no worries when trying to recover from a bad overclock/setting. Only the bios is still very laggy to work with. My Logitech MX518 gaming mouse behaves very erratic and only a mouse swap solves the bios movement issues. This mouse bug is found on the UD3/5 and 7, so be aware if you still use a mouse of this type. Let's hope the X79 biosses will still get a major overhaul alike the Z77 series.

Performance wise, the UD3 is right in front. There are no weird/unexplainable performance dips. And it's in the right spot to challenge any other X79 board out there. Even Gigabyte's own in house overclocker Hicookie has achieved amasing scores on his UD3 board. Prooving the hardware design is up to the task. But this was done when overclocking under cold. And here comes one of the negative points of any X79 Gigabyte board out there. Air or water overclocking is roughly limited at 4.6-4.8GHz. More than enough fo rmost demanding users. But some still dream of a 5GHz Air overclock. And it can be done, but on other vendors boards. The Gigabyte design/bios when overclocking on air/water hit's a sweetspot rather quickly. From there one you will have to start to pump massive voltages to get over 4.8GHz. Voltages which are set far higher then on competitors boards. So keep that in mind, if you intend to go over 4.8GHz, look elsewhere. If a daily overclock of eg 4600Mhz is more than adequate and if you want the best bang for buck, then this board might be tailor made for you.

The 4 Way GPU support is really cool for an ATX PCB. The UD3 has got most important features covered. Okay some would have liked to have a second LAN port or 8 dimm slots. However lads, Gigabyte has nicely trimmed this board : making it available at one of the lowest price tags on the street. And besides the performance out of the box, that price is one of the major strong points of this little UD3. The socket 2011 platform is already far from cheap. The quadcore i7-3820 CPU is affordable, though it's hexacore brethern cost roughly the double and more. Add to that list : quad channel RAM kits, an aftermarket CPU cooler, etc...

For them that seek a very powerfull multi GPU setup, this UD3 is a big bargain. Don't be fooled by it's low price tag, the UD3 could rock your world. It's performance is on par and sometimes even better then the rivals offerings. This X79-UD3 has got a lot going for it and is heartly recommended by the Shrimps team !