A Closer Look
Lets get started with backplate connectivity. If you have a bunch of monitors this board has you covered. If you do not, there is a bunch of wasted space that could be used for other things as previously mentioned. Six USB 3.0 ports is nice but some USB 2.0 ports would have been nice to offer flexibility. Throughout setup I had quite a few problems trying to get this board set up since I did not have a PS/2 keyboard or mouse and some of the USB3 ports do not work until drivers are installed in your operating system. .
Ethernet,7.1 sound, and eSATA are also offered. The sound in particular feels like an upgrade from previous Gigabyte boards. It won’t beat out a quality sound card but it can also make due if you don’t mind the loss in sound quality (which isn’t huge).
Expansion-slot wise you get three 1x PCIE slots, three 16x slots and a PCI slot. Everything is spaced out well too so you have plenty of options regarding different sized video cards and other expansion options.
BIOS
I have to say, if you get this board from the store. Please make sure to update the bios as soon as possible. The bios out of the box was absolutely terrible. Crashes galore, settings not sticking and the real fun was the computer not shutting off when doing “shut down” or “restart” in an operating system. It would just hang and run until the power button was pressed.
After updating to the F9 bios which was the most recent the bios became much more stable and use-able. The 3D bios is really coming along nicely and looks much better than the 3D bios that was implemented on the previously reviewed X79-UD3. This is not to say the bios is perfect. While overclocking I had a few freezes and crashes within the bios. A restart fixed this but it was annoying none the less.
If you plan on overclocking make sure to set your load line calibration setting to Turbo or Extreme otherwise you will get very large amounts of v-droop (voltage dropping under full load). Measuring with a multi-meter with a voltage of 1.4v set in the bios the medium setting resulted in a droop to 1.362v, High resulted in a droop to 1.379v, Turbo drooped to 1.393 and Extreme slightly overvolted to 1.404v. Turbo and Extreme are within the margin of error but make sure to properly set LLC or you might be drooping much lower than expected.
Memory overclocking with this board is absolutely amazing. Settings and voltages are easy to find. This board is made to overclock and it shows with the kind of settings that are used, along with the performance it provides.
Now, on to performance!
