Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
The UD4 is the more affordable product in the X99 series from Gigabyte. By going 'budget' (if you can call it that) you will lose features like OC/power/reset buttons, voltage monitoring, diagnostic POST LED, WIFI, blue-tooth, a second NIC and features like such. Realistically you do need to wonder if you need such features at all. If you are a one time overclocker that finds a sweet spot and then just leaves the PC as is, then this motherboard for the money might definitely be the more appealing product. Specs and features wise overall there is also very little to complain about. This motherboard can be the infrastructure for your 2/3/4-way SLI or Crossfire build. We do however miss Wireless LAN WIFI big-time, it should be there included at default and not as an optional. Also just one Ethernet Gigabit NIC seems little for a product in this price class. You do receive ten 6 Gbps SATA 3 ports, a Sata Express port as well as an M.2 interface. There are plenty USB 3.0 ports assigned to the board so you will not lack them at all. Interesting to see is the improved audio segment with an extra preamp for headphones. Motherboards are slowly reaching audiophile levels, we like that.
The Platform Experience
The motherboard manufacturers simply went berserk with their motherboard designs, and I believe that 2014 has to be the best year of them all if you look at what the manufacturers did and now are offering. The overall per core performance remains seriously nice, but is at the level of pretty much any previous Nehalem architecture based processor core, Turbo 2.0 kicks in nicely up-to 3.5 GHz per core for the Core i7 5960X. For the professional user who uses heavily threaded software like content creation, that's where Haswell-E will make nice difference. Add to that quad-channel DDR4 memory which will offer excellent bandwidth and plenty of PCIe lanes, and you have a platform that will be hard to beat. The Intel X99 chipset is by all means a huge plus with this release you receive huge amounts of SATA3 and USB 3.0 ports among others. The motherboard manufacturers have gone through great lengths and offer the most luxurious products. It is a feast to the eyes to see and experience really.
Storage
Combined with ten SATA 6Gbps ports we can hardly agrue against anything. SATA Express is supported, but I for-see that'll be an un-used connector as I do not see and expect SATA Express taking off anytime soon if at all. More interesting I find to be the M.2 interface, pop in a M.2 compatible PCI-E SSD and you'll see your SSD quickly perform in the 700/800 Mb/sec range. Overall your SATA and M.2 connectivity is plentiful and top notch when it comes to performance.
Aesthetics
We like that Gigabyte decided to make a move towards the yellow vs dark black design with the UD4 series. It will however be a little difficult to combine with other components color wise. But then again if you stick to a graphics card that is all black including the cooler, it might look excellent. The sheer looks are overall sweet and in a dark chassis with a inner dark paint-job, it would look sweet for sure.
Tweaking
The tweaking performance of this motherboard was on par with what our sample handles, and we do have a poor CPU sample in terms of tweaking. Realistically at 1.30 Volts you should be able to get the Core i7 5960X at roughly ~4400 MHz on all cores. However we need 1.40 Volts for that. And even though that seems a little shy as a tweak, it remains to be almost 4300~4400 MHz on 8 physical CPU cores. We learned from others that they have been able to reach 4.5 GHz on all 8-cored with just a 1.25v Vcore. Some clock great on low voltages, other behave like a pig, in our case where we needed 1.4 Volts to reach 4.4 GHz and have gotten the pig. Regardless, overclocking wise, you will have plenty of headroom to fool around with. It really is a fun processor to tweak with and the motherboard certainly isn't preventing a bad overclock, on the contrary; this board was designed to offer all features needed and quickly get you up-to snuff tweaking wise.
Final Words
The price is what it is all about and at a sub 200 EURO price-tag, this is one of the cheaper X99 motherboards. Other than the more enthusiast range features for overclockers there is very little to dislike about the X99 UD4. I do miss AC WIFI, it should be there at default. The motherboards offers all that is needed for a long time, features like the 10 SATA 6 Gbps ports, the improved 7.1 channel HD audio circuitry as delivered by the high-end Realtek ALC1150 codec in conjunction with an amplifier, you get support for quality headphones that have an impedance of up to 600 Ohms. This motherboard is multi-GPU ready up-to 2/3/4 way SLI/Crossfire. We can wholeheartedly recommend the Gigabyte UD4 X99 for the decent features, nice dark looks and a build that will last you a long time with your DDR4 / Haswell-E build.
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