Gigabyte X79 UD7 review

Final words and conclusion

The X79 UF7 is an impressive motherboard. It's feature rich, a great overclocker and has downright gorgeous looks. If you are a novice overclocker and go for easy, flick the OC button at the rear IO backplate and it will get you an instant performance boost. Overclocking itself with the new 3D BIOS is fun as well, it really is an easy to work in environment. Gigabyte implemented two uEFI BIOSes by the way, you can can switch in-between them (say a normal and high performance profile), good stuff.

For overclocking itself we reached 4800 MHz in a matter if minutes and 5 GHz after a while. That last step did need some fine-tuning though. Mind you though that we work with vanilla picked engineering sample CPUs, we can never guarantee you'll achieve the same results at home. It works vice versa as well, we've seen end-users with much higher overclocks then we have ever achieved, good on ya ;)

So yeah, we have little to complain, whatever memory we popped in it worked right out of the box, the XMP profiles are recognized and can be activated making your memory configurations really easy.

The board layout itself is pretty good, you could complain about having only 4 DIMM slots, but quite honestly there are so many extra ICs on the motherboard that there hardly is any room left for anything else. Each square inch was tucked full and the many power phases will make sure each component has the right and stable amount of juice flowing through it.

The motherboard looks the way it does, a clean and stylish design. Oh one note I do have to make, the motherboard is based on an  XL-ATX form factor, that means its slightly bigger then you are used too. Make sure it fits in your chassis, the dimensions are 32.4 x 25.3 cm.

We like the included Wireless LAN and Bluetooth card as well. The baseline performance will be as good as any X79 motherboard, however the features are uncanny. The motherboard looses in the more extreme overclock conditions but manages to do alright very nicely.

With a price tag of roughly 300 EUR the UD7 isn't one of the cheapest models alright, it however does bring a lot to the table. it's a very well thought through motherboard that brings an excellent foundation towards the X79 chipset and that sexy Sandy-Bridge-E processor, so let's just call her Sandy.

Now I live in the Netherlands, we dig Orange as its our national color, as such I adore the looks of the motherboard, but that won't be the same for everybody though. The color is very out there. If you like it, then you're in luck as it's one of the best X79 motherboards out there on the market that matches your style, looks, features and options. Definitely highly recommended.

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