Intel is in full swing with the X79 and their Sandy Bridge-E CPUs. We have watched as they have broken and re-broken records for performance and in some cases overclocking. Behind all of this we have the X79 chipset with its quad-channel DDR3 configuration and some impressive power specifications. Intel has also brought back BCLK overclocking which has made things very interesting. We have a few X79 boards in the lab and are working on finding out just what they can do and how they actually work in the real world. One of these is also our second Gigabyte motherboard; the X79-UD5. This will also be our first video preview where we show you and talk about the design and features. So let’s dive in and see what the GA-X79-UD5 has to offer…
The Layout -The layout of any motherboard is important. Even simple mistakes in component placement or the signal traces can cause major issued in performance and stability. With the ATX form factor we find that this is even truer; the devices we drop onto them demand more and cleaner power while the signal speeds push faster and faster. The GA-X78-UD5 is the typical ATX layout and is fairly typical as far as the layout for an X79 motherboard. Unlike the G1.Assassin 2 the X79-UD5 has the full eight slots for memory. This could mean a couple of things, on the one side it could mean slower top-end memory performance or it could simply mean that Gigabyte had more time to get the training layout down (and they also did not have to worry about an complete audio card on the board.The cooling on the board was much smaller than I would have thought and does make us wonder if we are going to be able to hit the same clocks as we did with the G1.Assassin2. The rest of the board is fairly typical with three PCIe x16 mechanical slots (only two are fully x16 electrical) and even a PCI 2.0 slot for those legacy devices.{gallery}stories/Reviews/01-26-2012/Board{/gallery}
