I only had a day to work with the UD4, but here is what I noted from this board.
The UD4 is a workstation board with some overclocking features and a few of the main things missing as an OC board is a dedicated power button and post LED, you quickly realize how dependent you are on these if you OC this board. This board does not come with an adapter bracket to enable through holes to be used as pictured from the back of the board below in rotation. So people with custom coolers will need to source the correct bracket or correct heat sink. The sinks mounted on the board are held down firmly with screws. This bundle did not come with WiFi or the Thunder Bolt add on card, the WiFi bracket was installed on the board. The bundle in the box was fairly minimal like you would find in all other motherboard box, no surprises other than the LED back plate and fancy braided SATA cables. In the BIOS is familiar Gigabyte layout, the structure is easy to navigate and understand, options are well labeled and a full range of voltage knobs are present to do just about everything. The 5960X CPU has the ability to turn off specific cores, this is different from what we have seen in the past. The UD4 does not give you the option to turn of specific cores but it does let you turn off a certain number of cores. After a BIOS update, the board came to life and ran perfectly in windows and for benchmarks at 4850Mhz on my 3 stage cascade -105c. I am a bit more gentle on these cores when benching max threads. The dual M.2 MSATA look interesting, hopefully at some point this gets re-visited. |
5960X @ 5.62Ghz 2C/2T enabledThis board could not reach the max potential of the CPU or memory, granted it is not an OC board but it should have done better with memory overclocking and this will improve with BIOS updates. I know these Corsair 2666C15 modules can do 3000C15 1T at 1.35v but this board was limited to 2800C15 2T, I could not get 1T to run nor could I break 3000Mhz.
On the CPU side, I ran it a bit lower than normal not to hurt anything. I wanted strong repeatable results to show this is a very strong board. Overall, a very strong and well provisioned workstation board in time for the market. Gigabyte is delivering a wide range of boards and has done well in getting them all ready in time. I did not test the audio, I wish I had time to get to everything but when working on several boards in a very short time frame doesn't leave any time to get in depth. http://www.gigabyte.com/press-center/news-page.aspx?nid=1313 |