The X79 chipset is nothing new, in fact in motherboard years it is quite old. However that does not mean that is it obsolete. If anything there are still many people that use the platform for their Sandy Bridge-E CPUs and now that the Ivy Bridge – E is out it is a great option. As we have both of these CPUs in the lab we decided to take a look at a single X79 board and see how it fares with both the Core i7 3960X and 4960X. The board we chose for this is the Gigabyte X79-UP4. Since we have not had this board in the lab before we decided to do the full work up on the X79-UP4 before we dive into the meat of the matter and run both of these CPUs through our gauntlet of tests. So let’s get things started.
Features -In the current market motherboard (and indeed almost all component) performance is very close. The days of a large performance advantage between boards using the same chipset are long gone. That is unless someone makes a HUGE mistake (like runs traces completely wrong). Now, the thing that differentiates different products is the features. These are things like power management, extra slots, better audio CODECs etc. It is these items that R&D teams work so hard to drop into what are really identical pieces of hardware at their most basic level. The Gigabyte X79-UP4 is not a board that really has a ton of obvious features. That does not mean it is without features, it is just that most of the things that will make the X79-UP4 attractive are going to be inside. So let’s take a look at the features that make the X79-UP4 a solid board.
Excellent -Quad-SLI/Crossfire supportPCIe Gen 3.0 Support (with the right CPU)Gigabyte 3D PowerGigabyte Ultra Durable 5 (IR3550)
These items do make the X79-UP4 stand out from the crowd in that these help make the board good at what it was built for.
In the middle (sort of good) -On/Off ChargeDual 3D Bios8-RAM Slots
Floor Mats -USB 3.0SATA 3.0eSATA
Conclusion – So far we are liking what we see in the Gigabyte X79-UP4. We still need to see how well it performs with both the 3960 and 4960, but if the design and component choices are any indication we should see a solid performer. There are still some items that we wonder about though; considering the amount of power the board is going to draw for PCIe 3.0 cards why did Gigabyte go with only one extra 8-pin power connector for the memory and CPU? Will this be a problem when we try to push the CPU and memory faster? Well that is something that we are going to have to find out in part two of this review.
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