Earlier this year when we visited Gigabyte during CES they reiterated something that they said about three years ago. They are committed to providing a much better performing product and are gearing themselves more and more toward the enthusiast and gamer’s market. We have watched them make this shift since we first started working with them back in early 2005. Now 6+ years later we can say they have made this transition well. Their lineup has become much more diversified with a good separation of products. We have already shown you some of the top end boards like the G1.Assassin2 and the X79-UD5 and have goe though the design and features of the X79-UD3 so now we can tell you how this board really performs. Let’s take a look.
Value -Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item. The Gigabyte X79-UD3 will cost you $249.99 which is not a bad price when you consider where it sits in the performance rankings. It would have been a better value if Gigabyte had left in the WiFi and Bluetooth module, but considering there are X79 boards that do not have the WiFi/Bluetooth module that are $30 more $250 is still a good price, especially when you throw in quad SLI and Crossfire.Conclusion -Normally we would have a video to accompany our written final thoughts. This time, however, we have the X79-UD3 still on the test bench for some Windows 8 gaming tests. We will be covering our final thoughts in the traditional way this time. Now that we have that out of the way let’s talk about the X79-UD3. We found the Gigabyte X79-UD3 to be a solid board. It is not going to win you any speed records without some improvements in the BIOS (and more headroom for overclocking). Still performance was good for the price. We also liked the option for Four-Way SLI and Crossfire, although this is an expensive setup to build you are not spending a ton of money on your motherboard to get there. Granted the $50 or so that you will save is not going to make up with the cost of the PSU and the additional GPUs but it is nice to have as an option. Overall the X79-UD3 is a low cost option for anyone looking to get into Intel’s top of the line CPUs. You get quite a bit for your money and the performance is not bad at all. For its price, performance and flexibility the Gigabyte X79-UD3 picks up our Bronze Key award.Discuss this in our Forum
