Gigabyte X99 UD4 (LGA 2011-3) Motherboard Review

Introduction, Specifications and Packaging A short while ago we took Gigabyte's X99 Gaming 5 motherboard to our test bench for a review. As the name suggests that particular motherboard was targeted at Gamers with its feature set and styling. Today we have with us a motherboard targeted at a broader X99 user-base than Gamers. The Gigabyte X99 UD4 is Gigabyte's most affordable X99 offering but still retains all of the high performance features of the X99 platform. At a fundamental level this board is very similar to the X99 Gaming 5 except the styling uses a different colour scheme, the audio has fewer features and uses a different codec and the Gigabit LAN is now Intel instead of Killer. Overclocking capabilities and features are similar - both boards feature high quality 6 phase designs with International Rectifier PWM controls and there are no onboard buttons or any read-off points. Overclocking buttons and features are reserved for higher end SKUs like the X99 SOC-FORCE. This board still boasts support for up to 8 DDR4 modules, 4-Way GPU configurations, up to 10 SATA III devices or 8 SATA III devices and a SATA Express device and there's even dual M.2 ports for more storage and optional WiFi/Bluetooth combo cards. The Gigabyte X99 UD4 will undoubtedly be a popular motherboard for Gigabyte just like how their X79-UD5 model was in the last generation. Let's now take a detailed look at this motherboard's specifications: Packaging and Accessories The X99 UD4 comes in one of the smallest boxes I've seen for an X99 motherboard. The branding is Gigabyte's mainstream "Ultra Durable" series, remember Gigabyte's other two SKUs are the Gaming line and the Overclocking line. Around the back we find a really in-depth motherboard analysis focusing on features, performance and the quality of the components used in this board's construction. Accessories are modest for an X99 platform board. As Nvidia SLI certification requires there's a range of 2, 3 and 4 Way SLI bridges and also a 2-Way AMD CrossFire bridge. Remember AMD's newest GPU SKUs do not require bridges anymore as the XDMA "bridge-less" feature was implemented. Four braided SATA cables, a rear I/O and a power adapter cable make up the rest of the accessories. Moving onto the mundane inclusions and we find some basic documentation and a driver/utility disc. A Closer Look & Layout Analysis For once we've got a motherboard that isn't red & black which makes a pleasant change. The orange and black colour scheme makes it a fairly distinct looking board but at the same time it is still understated and clean. You'd have no trouble fitting this board into any build and let's face it you could easily remove the heatsinks and give them a custom paint job. The layout is very similar to the X99 Gaming 5 in that it is very clean and not as busy as some higher end boards. The decision not to equip lots of buttons and switches benefits most people because it means a cheaper motherboard. Around the CPU socket area we find the high quality 6 phase VRM and the LGA 2011-3 socket sided by eight DDR4 slots. A heat pipe connects the chipset heatsink to the CPU VRM heatsink. By the chipset we also find 10 SATA III, 1 SATA Express and all the usual front panel and USB connectivity headers. PCIe slots are in abundance as this is an X99 platform motherboard. In between the PCI lanes we find two stacked M.2 lanes to allow you to use an M.2 storage device and M.2 WiFi/Bluetooth card. The audio section comes on a separated PCB and uses high-grade audio capacitors, unlike the Gaming 5 X99 motherboard there's no headphone amplifier, upgradeable OP-AMP or gain boost switch. At the rear I/O we find a variety of peripheral connectivity options. On the left there's keyboard and mouse PS/2 ports: not necessarily JUST for legacy peripherals, some people use modern USB peripherals but like to connect them through PS/2 due to the latency and overhead advantages. There are four USB 2.0 ports and the white USB port updates the BIOS using Gigabyte's BIOS flashback. There are six USB 3.0 ports (the white port serves as a USB 3.0 port once the BIOS post takes place) and a Gigabyte ethernet port. Five audio jacks link you up to the 7.1 channel audio implementation. There's a hollow frame at the end for mounting a WiFi/Bluetooth combo card should you decide to take advantage of that but it isn't included as standard because it would drive the price up for a feature not everyone wants. At the top of the motherboard there's only an 8 pin EPS connector, the CPU fan headers are located further down the board. Looking closer at the CPU socket we can see those two CPU fan headers. The PCB is matte black and all heatsinks are easily removable using a phillips head screwdriver. The Test System and Test Software Before we delve into any testing we would like to take this opportunity to review our test system and thank those sponsors who kindly provided us with test equipment to make our work possible. Test System Motherboard: varies by review CPU: Intel Core i7 5960X Processor GPU: Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X graphics card RAM: Crucial 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4 2133MHz memory Kit (CL15) Cooling: Corsair H100i with Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Compound Case: Lian Li PC-T60A test bench Storage Drives: Kingston 240GB Hyper X 3K SSD for the boot drive, Patriot SuperSonic Magnum 256GB USB 3.0 flash drive for USB 3.0 testing, SanDisk Extreme Pro 240GB SSD for SATA testing and the Plextor 256GB M6e M.2 SSD for M.2 testing PSU: Be Quiet Power Zone 1000W Power Supply Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit SP1 Networking: ASUS RT-AC68U router for LAN/WLAN testing Test Software SiSoft Sandra Engineer - available here. WPrime - available here. Cinebench - available here. 3DMark - available here. Bioshock Infinite - available here. Tomb Raider - available here. AIDA 64 Engineer - available here. DPC Latency Analyser - available here. Rightmark Audio Analyser - available here. LAN Speed Test Lite - available here. Passmark - available here. BIOS Gigabyte's UEFI DualBIOS enters you straight into a splash screen page (pictured above). From there it offers up two different layouts. The swanky 1080p BIOS, pictured directly below, or the more traditional mode, pictured two down, we've taken a look around the more traditional BIOS as it is where most X99 users will feel at home. With Gigabyte's latest X99 BIOS I certainly can't complain about the feature set: having the ability to choose between two styles of BIOS is nice. I prefer the "old-school" BIOS which has actually had a significant overhaul since Z97, see for example the Gigabyte Z97MX-Gaming 5 BIOS. It must be said straight away that the new BIOS needs fine tuning. Since I started this review we've gone through a lot of BIOS versions in under a week but bugs are still here. For most the BIOS has all the features, but needs some tweaking and fine tuning. For example sometimes entering the BIOS with the delete key just results in a black screen until you reset, it is also hard to identify the drives you are saving a screen shot to since the device names are very confusing. On the positive side though Gigabyte have already fixed a significant mouse bug. The M.I.T tab features all the CPU & memory tweaking options with voltages and frequencies. M.I.T also contains fan controls and temperature warnings. As you progress to the right of the M.I.T the tabs are not as frequently needed. Most of the settings under the reset of the tabs you'll hardly ever change except maybe you boot order when you first set your system up. The chipset tab does contain some useful things if you're someone who's utilising lots of PCIe based devices including M.2, SATA Express and multiple graphics cards. From here you can enable and disable certain things, remember a lot of PCIe based connections share bandwidth so you can't populate everything. Software Overview The Gigabyte software utilities are helpfully centred around one main piece of software: the Gigabyte APP Center. On Gigabyte X99 motherboards the APP Center hosts the following utilities: @BIOS - a BIOS version checker and BIOS updater Ambient LED - the software which allows you to control the lighting effects of the various LEDs on the board USB Blocker - software that allows you to control what USB devices are allowed to connect Cloud Station & Cloud Station Server - Gigabyte's go-to home cloud software that allows you to easily manage and access your files in a cloud-based way EasyTune - the application that allows you to overclock and tweak from within the OS EZ Setup - an application for easily configuring Intel utilities like Rapid Start and Smart Connect Fast Boot - a splash screen that enables you to enable or disable the Gigabyte Fast Boot function Game Controller - software to enable you to easily tweak and tune macros, mouse sensitivity and various peripheral input functions System Information Viewer - basically a summary of your system with some fan control options too Smart Time Lock - a time-based PC locking mechanism, good if you're building a PC for your kids Smart Recovery 2 - an automated backup utility V-Tuner - a GPU tweaking utility For most people you won't need all these software items, in which case you can easily uninstall (or not install in the first place) the unnecessary items. Overclocking We knew our Haswell-E chip could do 4.2GHz Prime95 stable but we also knew pushing a little further was possible. With Gigabyte's X99 UD4 4.5GHz was possible with 1.35 volts on the VCORE, that's identical overclocking settings to the Gigabyte X99 Gaming 5 motherboard we reviewed recently because they are very similar motherboards. 1.35 volts is a lot of voltage given the stock voltage is around 1.05-1.15v, but it is needed to keep 4.5GHz stable. Even then, 4.5GHz was not Prime95 stable but it was stable in everything else we used during our extensive benchmarking session. With 1.35 volts things get pretty toasty, our H100i was struggling to keep things south of 80 degrees and it isn't surprising given the Core i7 5960X at 1.35 volts has a TDP of around 250W - we will soon be getting in a swanky new Corsair H105 which should keep things running cooler and allow us to push a little further. It is worth noting that just like on Z97, X99 is more CPU-limited than motherboard limited. It is sad, but when Intel starts building VRM controls onto the CPU die it will always be the case. For most X99 users it is good news because it means entry level boards like this one from Gigabyte can easily match higher end offerings that are significantly more expensive. CPU Performance Cinebench CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's CPU performance. Cinebench R15 is a totally free utility and is available for download here. WPrime wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions. wPrime is a free utility that is available for download here. SiSoft Sandra The SiSoft Sandra Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks are widely used measures of compute power and performance for a wide array of real world usage scenarios. You can find out more details on these tests here or download SiSoft Sandra here. GPU Performance 3DMark 3DMark Firestrike is Futuremark's latest creation for testing the GPU performance of high end gaming PCs using Direct X 11 graphics. You can download a free basic version of 3DMark here. Tomb Raider Tomb Raider is a popular action-adventure video game published by Square Enix based on the Tomb Raider franchise. The game was released in 2013 and as of March 2014 had sold 6 million copies. Bioshock Infinite Bioshock Infinite is a first person shooter developed by Irrational Games that is the third instalment of the Bioshock series. The game is the last to be produced by Irrational Games before they announced their closure in February 2014. The game has sold over 4 million copies since its 2013 release. Memory Performance For our memory tests we use the built in memory benchmarks in AIDA64 Engineer and SiSoft Sandra. For more details on each of the benchmarks please see here and here respectively. AIDA64 Engineer SiSoft Sandra Combined Latency Test SATA, M.2 and USB Performance To test the storage performance in our motherboard reviews we use AIDA's Disk Benchmark utility built into their AIDA64 Engineer Edition software package and run read and write tests. We run each of the benchmark tests on a SATA III, USB 3.0 and M.2 device. For SATA III testing we use a Sandisk Extreme Pro 240GB SATA III SSD, for USB 3.0 testing we use the Patriot Supersonic Magnum USB 3.0 flash drive and for M.2 testing we use Plextor's 256GB M.2 M6e SSD. The drives are always formatted before use. Linear Read Linear Write Random Read Random Write Networking Performance For our networking tests we connect the test system up to our Intel Gigabit enabled ASUS Rampage IV Extreme X79 motherboard test system through the ASUS RT-AC68U router and run our tests. We opted for this over a direct point-to-point connection because we wanted to simulate real world performance. For our WiFi tests we do the same except we connect the test system to the ASUS RT-AC68U router via WiFi at a distance of 2 metres from the router. LAN Speed Test Lite LAN Speed Test was designed from the ground up to be a simple but powerful tool for measuring file transfer, hard drive, USB Drive, and Local Area Network (LAN) speeds (wired & wireless). It does this by building a file in memory, then transfers it both ways (without effects of windows file caching) while keeping track of the time. Download the free Lan Speed Test Lite utility from here. Passmark Performance Test 8 The PassMark Advanced Network Test (which is part of PerformanceTest) is designed to test the data transfer rate between two computers both of which must be running PerformanceTest. One of the computers must act as the server and will sit waiting for a connection. The other computer acts as a client. It connects to the server machine and sends data to it for the duration of the test. You can download a trial version of PerformanceTest from here. LAN Audio Performance RightMark Audio Analyser (RMAA) RMAA suite is designed for testing quality of analog and digital paths of any audio device. The results are obtained by playing and recording test signals passed through the tested audio path by means of frequency analysis algorithms. A more common mark is also provided for those unfamiliar with measured technical parameters. Available here. We run the RMAA test using a 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable connecting the line out to the line in to test the quality of the motherboard audio codec not any external audio devices. We run the complete playback and recording test at default settings and then get RMAA to interpret the results giving the below outputs. We sync the playback and recording audio devices to the same setting as the test for accurate results. 16 Bit, 48KHz (DVD Quality) 16 Bit, 96KHz (Studio Quality) 24 Bit, 96KHz (Studio Quality) DPC Latency Analyser Thesycon’s DPC Latency Checker is a Windows tool that analyses the capabilities of a computer system to handle real-time data streams properly. It may help to find the cause for interruptions in real-time audio and video streams, also known as drop-outs. Available here. Power Consumption Power Consumption To measure power consumption we use a killawatt meter and measure the total system power draw at the wall. We run two different use-case scenarios for 5 minutes and take the average reading. The first scenario is a desktop idle state with the minimum number of programs running as possible, the second is AIDA 64's System Stability Test with CPU, FPU, cache system memory and GPU options selected: this simulates a heavy & intensive full system load. Final Thoughts Pricing (accurate at the time of writing) The Gigabyte X99 UD4 motherboard retails for $258.99 at Newegg and $259.99 at Amazon in the USA. Here in the UK it can be had for £167.99 at Overclockers UK. Gigabyte offer a 3 year warranty with this product. Summary The phrase"entry-level motherboard" is a misleading one for the X99 platform. Indeed by definition the Gigabyte X99 UD4 is an entry level product, as it is one of the cheapest X99 motherboards money can buy making it the entry level standard for the platform. However, do not be mistaken: for an entry level product the Gigabyte X99 UD4 is incredibly feature packed and is hard to ignore. If you're torn between a Core i7 4790K Z97 system or Core i7 5820K X99 system the Gigabyte X99 UD4 could help you make that decision by bringing the cost of the X99 platform down and making it more accessible. The Gigabyte X99 UD4 loses very few features over the X99 Gaming 5, in fact I prefer this board for a number of reasons. Firstly, the audio may lose quite a few features such as headphone amplification, switchable op-amps and gain controls but the codec that is used is actually better performing (although not that noticeable in the real world) and has a more sophisticated software package with better configurable options. Secondly, the ethernet is now provided by Intel instead of Killer which for general users is a nicer option. The Intel NIC doesn't always offer as much throughput in general tests but it does use less CPU overhead and the software package is less intrusive. That said if you do desire for better packet prioritization in gaming the Killer NIC in the X99 Gaming 5 option is a great choice but if you don't need it the Intel NIC is better. Setting the comparisons aside the rest of the Gigabyte X99 UD4 is a very pleasing package for the price. Gigabyte's dual BIOS has grown on me a lot and I still like it with X99, sure the early versions of the BIOS have been slightly buggy but Gigabyte are working around the clock on BIOS updates and fixes and as I'm writing a number of problems we saw in testing have been ficreation of the App Center to unify all that software was a smart idea, but the unification process still needs some work to make the software more user friendly. The programs are still very discrete and all the app center does is effectively collate shortcuts to all the exe files and each program or utility launches discretely. That said, it's free with the motherboard and to this day most people are not fans of motherboard software, so take this as you will. The overall design and aesthetic of the board is clean and sensible. The X99 UD4 has a well balanced range of connectivity on the storage, PCI Express and USB side. The only exclusion I can take note of is the omission of a WiFi or Bluetooth card for the specially included M.2 WiFi slot they have. It does make sense to exclude it to keep the price down for most users that do not want the WiFi but Gigabyte need to provide the M.2 card and antennae as a "sold separately" accessory at the same retailers who stock the boards with which that M.2 WiFi package is compatible. The other noteworthy exclusion is any onboard buttons or overclocking features, but this board is not targeted at that kind of user and again its the exclusion of things like this that help keep costs down on this board making it so attractively priced. Finally, a last note on performance. This board performs well in the bulk of CPU, GPU, networking and audio tests. Just like with the X99 Gaming 5 only memory performance was a little off-the-mark, especially the fact overclocking decreased memory performance. I can hope that future BIOS releases from Gigabyte will improve the memory performance, even if they do not there isn't really any real world hit from memory performance as most the memory benchmarks we use are synthetic in what they show. Pros Fantastic pricing for what you get High quality audio & networking hardware Dual BIOS design Great range of storage & peripheral connectivity 4 Way GPU support Cons BIOS needs a little tweaking Memory performance could be improved Not clear where to acquire the optional WiFi M.2 accessory "The X99 platform may not be the cheapest but with Gigabyte's X99 UD4 and a six-core i7 5820K you can easily spec up a system to beat Intel's flagship Z97 part, the i7 4790K and a high-end motherboard. What's even more impressive is Gigabyte's X99 UD4 allows you to do that at a similar price point: it's a great board with a fantastic price." Thank you to Gigabyte for providing this review sample.