Exclusive: Gigabyte GA-X99-UD5 WiFi Motherboard Revealed

We have managed to get our hands on an exclusive picture of Gigabyte’s upcoming GA-X99-UD5 WiFi motherboard, pictured above. This motherboard will be part of Gigabyte’s Ultra Durable line for X99 meaning it has the black and orange colour scheme with some silver & grey accenting. Strangely the Gigabyte X99-UD5 WiFi is virtually identical to the flagship Ultra Durable motherboard the X99-UD7 WiFi. We’ve already had a look at that board and the similarities are striking. From further studying we have been able to confirm that there are a few noticeable differences between the two:

• Gigabyte’s UD5 WiFi sports a FastBoot and OC button which the UD7 WiFi does not have
• Gigabyte’s UD5 WiFi lacks a USB DAC port on the rear I/O which the UD7 WiFi has
• Gigabyte’s UD5 WiFi loses a connecting heat pipe between the top heatsink and the PCH heatsink which the UD7 WiFi has

Those four things aside we can say that for all intents and purposes the two boards are more or less identical. This isn’t a bad thing because it means you can get a UD7-quality motherboard for the price of a UD5. However, it does pose a few problems for consumers when it comes to differentiating between the two.

Some of the features about Gigabyte’s X99-UD5 that can be seen from the board include:

• 4 Way SLI and CrossFire support, bandwidth will vary by CPUs as we know the Core i7 5820K has 28 PCIe lanes compared to the 40 PCIe lanes on the Core i7 5930K and 5960X
• Dual M.2 connectors which appear to be stacked vertically
• 802.11 AC WiFI which is dual band and likely includes Bluetooth
• 10 SATA III ports of which four are shared with dual SATA Express ports
• Two banks of Quad Channel DDR4 memory support
• Isolated audio with custom audio grade capacitors, likely Realtek ALC1150 codec powered
• Overclocking buttons and debug LEDs

The X99-UD5 WiFi looks set to be a cracking motherboard, offering almost all the features of a flagship but without the flagship price.

Source: eTeknix