GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD5 (rev. 1.0) Pro Reviews

It’s a little unnerving, however, when although something seems to mostly work well, there are a couple of things here or there that cast doubt, like when Van Halen would find brown M&Ms in the bowl backstage (someone didn’t read the rider all the way through and got sloppy, causing the band to wonder what other details were missed). In the case of the Gigabyte X79-UD5, it’s our shaky BIOS experience and the OC button that didn’t seem to work which gave us pause. Granted, these issues can be resolved with a simply BIOS tweak but the issues didn't instill complete confidence.

The Intel X79-based Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 is a mostly fantastic platform and rock solid foundation to assemble a new PC on. PCSTATS was generally unhappy with the laggy 3D BIOS but even that disappointment wasn't a deal breaker in our books. Given the memory capacity this board can handle, the expansive SATA III ports and clean layout, we'd highly recommended the GA-X79-UD5 for anyone contemplating the move from a 32-bit operating system environment to 64-bit. A motherboard like the Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 will get you in the game with plenty of room to grow for several years down the road. That's the kind of future proofing PCSTATS can certainly recommend!

I'd like to thank our friends at Gigabyte for providing the GA-X79-UD5 motherboard for our review today. This is the second X79-based motherboard I've evaluated, and this platform continues to impress me with solid gaming and overall performance results. The upgraded 3D BIOS was a pleasure to use after I played with the UEFI a bit to find out where all the overclocking options were located. I also had to learn to use the roll-over functions on the main 3D BIOS screen because I didn't notice how they worked when I initially entered the BIOS. The $300 price tag may make consumers be a bit more cautious about picking up the X79-UD5 for their next upgrade, but Gigabyte made a smart move by beefing up the accessory bundle to include a Bluetooth 4.0 and wireless N card. Their bundled software package for updating the BIOS, motherboard drivers, and automatic overclocking worked seamlessly and I would definitely recommend it to users new to building PCs from scratch.

Overall, we have too many little reservations. The X79-UD5 is a good motherboard in many respects, but there is no feature or capability so unique or well implemented that makes it stand out from the rest of what is an impressively strong contingent of X79 motherboards. Furthermore, there is an ominous shadow over GIGABYTE's X79 lineup, and although largely unfounded it will remain until they inevitably unveil a revised X79A series sometime down the road.

The GIGABYTE X79-UD5 motherboard is a very reasonable priced motherboard, especially compared to its competition. At a price of $279.99 after mail-in-rebate, it really makes it difficult for others to compete with GIGABYTE's offering. The X79-UD5 comes with excellent features, great hardware accessories, as well as an overall great motherboard layout, making it a fantastic board for not just any gamer, but also for an overclocker, a PC enthusiast, and creative users working with film and photography. The GIGABYTE X79-UD5 did have a rough first few weeks when it hit the store shelves, and we had a few issues that needed addressing especially around the BIOS, however, with the help of some great people at GIGABYTE, these issues got resolved in no time, and we had no major issues since. While the cooling solution on the X79-UD5 is not too complicated and is also passive, it is a possibility that a non-well ventilated system will cause some bottlenecks and down throttling on your CPU clock speeds. However, adding a fan that blows over the VRM can go long ways and also improve overall performance and stability of the system. The part that we enjoyed the most about the UD5 was probably the 8 DIMM slots, which make it possible to install up to 64GB of memory, and of course the possibility to install up to 3 high-end video cards in a 3-way SLI or CrossFireX configuration. This is what makes the GIGABYTE X79-UD5 such an amazing board for its price. If you are a gamer, you can fill up all the PCIe slots with your video cards and have a great gaming experience, while if you are a film maker, the addition of 4 extra DIMM slots can make a massive difference in editing and rendering performance.

This board does have a very nice looking layout and PCB. It also comes with lots of amazing and useful features that are sure to set it apart from the competition. For the price that this board is listed at it really is a great value. During our testing the overall temperatures never exceeded 45 degrees for either the chipset or the PCB. This translates into great overall stability and should help to facilitate good overclocking potential. Due to time constraints we really didn’t get a chance to do much overclocking with it. From what we saw though this board should provide plenty of overhead for those that want to push their hardware. Overall this is a great board and it for the included features it really does represent a great value for the user.

I liked the color scheme and the layout aside from the stupid placement of the CMOS battery. And the one flaw isn’t something you’ll find problematic very often. The board was stable under all conditions and most of the features worked properly despite a couple of annoyances. Still I can’t recommend the X79-UD5 and here is why: The UEFI interface needs work. I found it easy to navigate for the most part, but GBT need some consistency with regard to being able to input values in the fields the same way more often. It’s also extremely slow at times. There is also some needless double-clicking and the mouse just doesn’t feel precise and in fact feels like a waste of time. I hate how some values will allow you to press enter and see your options, some won’t. Some you can key the number in directly, others you have to hit the plus or minus key. The USB 3.0 ports seemed a bit flaky as well. I don’t know if this was a sign of some kind of hardware problem. I’ve never heard of Fresco’s PL1009 before, so it could be a driver maturation thing.

The Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 really did impress us every step of the way during our testing period. At first, it didn't clock as well as we had hoped, but looking closely at the hardware design, we knew this board was meant to be an overclocking-centric product, and just needed the right BIOS. As this is Gigabyte's first foray into AMI UEFI implementations, we were willing to overlook the poor overclocking, and had hoped for a new BIOS to fix the problems. When it came time for us to write up the review, with all of the testing completed, the entire Gigabyte X79 Express product line got a BIOS overhaul, and Gigabyte issued a press statement advising all customers to update to the new BIOS. Timing being what it was, we flashed to the new "F7" BIOS, to be completely amazed at the differences in performance offered, and the new-found overclocking ability that the hardware had hinted to.