With the apparent delay of Intel Ivy Bridge and of course the Z77 chipset that goes with it) we there is going to be a continued demand for the X79 chipset and the pretty much every flavor of the LGA2011 CPU. To be honest I think that even after Ivy Bridge there will be a demand as the replacement for the LGA 2011 CPUs will not hit the market until around Q4 2012 or even later. So with that in mind we are taking a look at what at first glance appears to be a low cost X79 motherboard from Gigabyte. However, once you take a look at it you just might begin to see the serious overclocking and GPU benchmarking potential that it has. Let’s take a look at the Quad-SLI/Crossfire capable X79-UD3 from Gigabyte.
The Box and Goodies -The new look for Gigabyte is a clean and sharp look. They have gotten away from the darker boxes with half faded images of the board and are moving into a clean white box with limited information on the front. Of course there is always going to be some sort of marketing on any motherboard box (there are some that are even contractual) so you will probably never see the day of a completely clean motherboard packaging. Still I have to say that I like the new look.
The back is where everything has been moved to though. Here you have a nicely laid out listing of features that (according to Gigabyte) give the X79-UD3 an edge over the competition. Some of these features like the 3D BIOS, 3D Power and Ultra Durable 3 are stock across the UD line up from Gigabyte, but are still nice to note on the box.
One thing that caught our eye (as we mentioned above is the option for Quad-SLI/Crossfire. This is a very nice feature in a board that costs $245.00. Once you get inside the box you will find that the included goodies are light, but that is more to keep the price down that anything else. You also will notice that you are not going to get the WiFi/Bluetooth adapter either.
