Gigabyte recalling three of its X79 boards

Andy Ruffell / 13 years ago

Last week, a Taiwanese overclocker was putting his OC workbench through simple OC stress test when he was ‘greeted’ with a surprise; his Gigabyte X79 UD3 motherboard went burst. This was due to the fact that the CPU VRM couldn’t cope with the stress and blew a MOSFET. While you can assist to the action in the video below, it’s not as dramatic as it sounds, but the overclocker was responded with condolences for his bad luck at the time.

This week seems to put a light on the subject as this incident isn’t specific to a single board, but Gigabyte received several complaints from overclockers where even moderate voltage-assisted CPU overclocking fried the VRMs.

The issue was found to be widespread among three of the company’s main socket LGA2011 products: the GA-X79-UD3, the GA-X79-UD5 and the G1.Assassin 2.

As it turns out, this issue is caused by a mixture of bad firmware, bad PWM circuitry on the board and bad quality PWM components. As a result, Gigabyte presents two solutions, the following limited to the Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu area.

The first one being a BIOS update for the affected products which will completely resolve the issue and will not affect the overclocking abilities of the boards.

The second solution is to return the board to Gigabyte in exchange for a free replacement.

In addition to the offered solutions, Gigabyte has also announced the general recall of the GA-X79-UD3, GA-X79-UD5, and G1.Assassin 2 board from the market, after which Gigabyte will redistribute the corrected boards. Once again, this applies for selected the selected area.

As for the UK, things are slightly different, only recall applied is of the faulty BIOS, and the Gigabyte UK website has been updated with the correct BIOS update: