Review of Gigabyte X79-UD7 Intel X79 Express chipset Sandy Bridge-E mainboard

Conclusion

The Gigabyte X79-UD7 is a XL-ATX motherboard. It is pretty apparent that the larger footprint allows more features to be put on this board largely due to the processor and heatsink occupying almost half the board. In order to install it, you might have to change your casing to fit this new board.

With a larger form factor, Quad CF/SLI can be realized without issues as part of the feature set of this board. I particularly like the OC feature, OC-VRM and OC-Touch. OC-Touch is definitely a plus as it only can fine tune the BCLK, it can change the multiplier by a press of the button. The 3D BIOS is also a first of it’s kind. It give users a refreshing way to interact with their board.

In terms of performance, the raw power of the processor is simply amazing. In some of the tests, it is 2X faster than it’s predecessor the Core i5 2500K. The AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 6 core is no where near it. Cinebench 11.5 results is a good example of it’s raw power. When it comes to gaming, it all depends on the external graphics card. Our compared systems might be GPU bound and that is probably we don’t see a big jump in 3D performance results. Perhaps the processor is simply too fast for the graphics card.

Overclocking wise, Core i7-3960X isn’t that easy to clock with CPUCLK adjustments. Instead, adjusting the unlocked multiplier should be the easier way to overclock it. On air cool, the 3960X can reach 5GHz on POST and stable is around 4.7GHz with Vcore set to 1.5+ v and vdimm at 1.65v. You can catch the LN2 cooling video here.

Gigabyte throws in a BT4.0+WIFI as part of the package. This is definitely one up as other brands only have a BT 3.0 bundled in.

In Conclusion, we feel that this board is aimed at the overclockers. We have seen it being used on LN2 and the processor is able to run full benchmarks at 5.4GHz. If you are looking for performance, there are cheaper variants of this board and they should perform equally well for your daily usage.

We give it our Gold Award

Pros

Quad way SLI/CF
USB 3.0
Bluetooth 4.0 + WIFI
OC-VRM
OC-Touch
3D BIOS

Cons

High price
XL-ATX form factor
Chipset no native USB 3 support

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.