Gigabyte X99 UD4 Motherboard Review - Introduction

Gigabyte X99 UD4 motherboard X99 at sub € 200

In this review we'll check out the Gigabyte X99 UD4; the more affordable X99 motherboard in the Gigabyte line-up, and we've have had our hands on. It has a nice feature set like SLI/Crossfire support, heaps of SATA3 connectors, M.2., good tweaking features, a near audiophile audio solution, and yeah the means to tweak. Join us in another X99 motherboard review.

The Intel Core i7-5960X and other Haswell-E chips were released on the market in September 2014, based on a new socket LGA2011-V3 infrastructure and DDR4 quad channel memory. The new Haswell-E series being released feature three models: Two 6-core and 1 8 core processor series, intended for the most high-end desktops anno 2014. For Intel is is the first 8 core desktop CPU for consumers. However, Intel has been offering 8 and even 12 core processors in their Xeon server line for quite some time now to the business channel.

With the new haswell-E processor comes a new chipset and slightly revised processor socket. Intel still uses Socket 2011, but its a revision 3 socket, meaning that the older Socket 2011 will not work on the new X99 chipset motherboards. That of course goes both ways, you can not use Haswell-E on say an X79 motherboard.  

Interesting is a first introduction towards DDR4 memory. The new memory allows for lower voltage memory modules, this memory defaults towards 2133 MHz at 1.2 Volts. However the memory controller is quad-channel compatible. As a result with overclocked memory at roughly 3 GHz, you can reach 70 maybe 80 GB/sec on your memory bandwidth, which are insane numbers. In this article we'll have a chat about a X99 motherboard in terms of the chipset and then will throw a decent photo-shoot and a benchmark suite at the products and get an indication what performance is like with the Intel Core i7-5960X and X99 Platform.

Gigabyte offers multiple motherboards based on the X99 design, and one the more affordable models is the high-end UD4 which we review today. This board supports 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 are two M.2 ports for more storage. The Gigabyte X99 UD4 will probably be amogst the more popular in demand SKUs due to its sub 200 EURO price level, which we'll show it all in the next pages of course. But first have a peek at what Gigabyte offers with the X99 UD4 motherboard, a product that is bound to tease and please with its nice dark looks.