A Closer Look
The biggest difference between this board and previous Gigabyte offerings is the UD4 technology under the hood. Improved VRM’s and a more reliable board PCB design help this board last longer (we will see in a few years) than previous Gigabyte designs.
Basic connectivity like a 1gb Ethernet port, 7.1 channel Audio, eSATA , USB 2.0 ports and a PS/2 port round out connectivity on the rear panel. If you are in need of extra ports, two USB 3.0 ports can be added with a header as well as headers for three more USB 2.0 ports.
Five PWM fan ports are on the board in case you have an urge to conenct some PWM fans and control fan speed using software.
Spacing on the motherboard expansion slots is quite good. I particularly like the three-slot spacing between full-sized PCIE connectors. It can be a big help for those who run three-slot GPU’s but still want to run a dual-card setup.
BIOS
If your board happens to come with the launch bios it would be a wise decision to upgrade to a newer bios as soon as possible. With the launch bios I saw a few glitches and random freezes in the bios when setting voltages or clockspeeds.
For the most part the bios is pretty solid. After updating I did not run into any issues while navigating the bios except for a weird bug where the board does not change to default memory clocks when switching to a type of memory with a different IC or capacity.
When it comes to CPU overclocking you can find everything you need to set your everyday overclocks or to go for world records. Voltages will let you go to levels far too high for basic ambient cooling. These voltages were also quite stable with LLC (load-line calibration) enabled and stayed quite close to the selected values throughout testing.
One area I really wish Gigabyte would improve would be on its use of Profiles. Most of the other board makers include memory profiles which aid in overclocking memory depending on the IC used on the memory as well as the capacity or brand. Gigabyte has none of these profiles which is disapointing.
Now, on to performance!
