Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 Review
by Ian Cutress on December 26, 2011 4:37 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gigabyte
- X79
- Sandy Bridge E
Many thanks to...
Many thanks go to G.Skill once again, for providing us with their latest RipjawsZ kit, after an accident caused one of my previous review memory kit DIMMs to no longer work. The kit G.Skill sent us is their F3-19200CL9Q-16GBZMD, a 4x4 GB kit for X79, rated at DDR3-2400 CL9 11-11-31 at 1.65V. This makes it a very fast kit on the market, which is represented in its large price tag.
Test Setup
| Processor |
Intel Sandy Bridge-E i7-3960X 6 Cores, 12 Threads, 3.3 GHz (3.9 GHz Turbo) |
| Motherboards | Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 |
| Cooling | Intel All-In-One Liquid Cooler, made by Asetek |
| Power Supply | Silverstone 1000W 80 PLUS Silver |
| Memory | G.Skill RipjawsZ DDR3-2400 CL9 11-11-31 4x4 GB Kit 1.65V |
| Memory Settings | XMP |
| Video Cards |
XFX HD 5850 1GB ECS GTX 580 1536MB |
| Video Drivers |
Catalyst 11.8 NVIDIA Drivers 285.62 |
| Hard Drive | Micron RealSSD C300 256GB |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Open Test Bed - CoolerMaster Lab V1.0 |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit |
| SATA Testing | Micron RealSSD C300 256GB |
| USB 2/3 Testing | Patriot 64GB SuperSonic USB 3.0 |
Power Consumption
Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter connected to the power supply, while in a dual GPU configuration. This method allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.
CPU Temperatures
With most users’ running boards on purely default BIOS settings, we are running at default settings for the CPU temperature tests. This is, in our outward view, an indication of how well (or how adventurous) the vendor has their BIOS configured on automatic settings. With a certain number of vendors not making CPU voltage, turbo voltage or LLC options configurable to the end user, which would directly affect power consumption and CPU temperatures at various usage levels, we find the test appropriate for the majority of cases. This does conflict somewhat with some vendors' methodology of providing a list of 'suggested' settings for reviewers to use. But unless those settings being implemented automatically for the end user, all these settings do for us it attempt to skew the results, and thus provide an unbalanced 'out of the box' result list to the readers who will rely on those default settings to make a judgment. CPU Temperatures are not really indicative of quality or performance, even though one would postulate that worse parts may produce higher temperatures. However, if a manufacturer uses more conductive material in the power plane, this reduces resistance and increases the voltage at the CPU, causing a higher temperature but potentially better stability.
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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.