Gigabyte X99-UD3P Motherboard Review – X99 On a Budget?

The X99-UD3P has only four memory slots. Of course, this is to be expected at this price point and is not unlike other motherboards in its category. That being said, those four slots do feature support for up to 64GB of DDR4 memory, if you use 16GB modules. We also have support for Intel XMP, with DDR4 modules up to 3333MHz.

The Gigabyte X99-UD3p also features native support for up to 4-way SLI or CrossFireX configurations, thanks to its X99 chipset. Through the  PCIe 3.0 slots on the motherboard we get up to a combined 320GB/s of total bandwidth available.

Two of the PCIe slots will run at x16 (PCIe_1, and PCIe_2), the other two (PCIe_3, and PCIe_4) will run at x8 mode. The 4ht slot and 1st slot share bandwidth, so when the 4th slot is occupied the 1st will run at x8. If you’re using a 5820K the other two slots will run at up to x8 (PCIe_2) and x4 (PCIe_3) each.

We also have 3x PCIe x1 slots which utilize the chipsets PCIe 2.0 (Gen2) lanes.

There’s also two M.2 slots, one dedicated to the optional WiFi add-in card (M2_WIFI), and the other (M2_10G) for use with either PCIe x2/x1 or SATA M.2 SSDs, and supports Socket 3, M key,  and type 2242/2260/2280 SSDs.

The motherboard features a total of 10 SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, 5 of which support RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10. The remaining 4 support IDE and AHCI modes only. There’s also a SATA Express port.

It’s worth noting that the SATA Express, M.2 (M2_10G), and SATA ports 4/5 can only be used one at a time.

Taking a look at our I/O we have a couple of old-school PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports. It is actually fairly uncommon to have two separate ports on newer boards if they have any at all, so this is interesting to see. We also have 6 USB 3.0 ports (Blue/White), 2 of which are provided by the Intel chipset, the remaining four from the Renesas uPD720210 USB 3.0 controller. The white port doubles as a Q-Flash port for updating the BIOS via USB. We also have 4 additional USB 2.0 ports (Black) which are also provided by the chipset.

There’s also two additional USB 2.0 headers, and a single USB 3.0 header, each of which can provide an additional two USB ports.

For networking we have a single Intel Gigabit Ethernet port, as well as a bracket for mounting the optional wireless card antennas. Finally, we have full 5.1 audio ports, as well as an optical S/PDIF which supports 7.1 audio provided by the on-board Realtek ALC1150 audio driver.

Rounding out our connectivity options we have a single Thunderbolt header for an optional Thunderbolt 2 add-in card.

Speaking of which, Gigabyte has gone far and a ways above just slapping on a Realtek’s top of the line audio chipset, they’ve also equipped it with a built-in audio amplifier and have traced a line between the audio chipset and the rest of the motherboard, to minimize interference. Taking that one step further, they’ve also located the Right and Left audio channels on separate PCB layers in order to eliminate any channel crosstalk. Finally, they’ve used premium, solid Japanese audio capacitors made by Nichicon.

That tracing separating the audio components also contains LEDs for what Gigabyte calls their ‘Ambient LED’ which can be programmed through included software to beat to music or audio being played.