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

TECHNOLOGY X TESTING PROTOCOL

At Technology X, we test our motherboards slightly different depending upon the product’s marketed purpose, whether it be an entry-level budget kit or a high-end enthusiast level kit.  Our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide, however, CPU C State alteration may or may not have occurred depending on the motherboard and BIOS configurations. Additionally, we also try to include links to the benchmarks used in our report so that you as the reader can replicate our tests to confirm that your system performs the way it should

TECHNOLOGY X TEST BENCH

All of the components we use for testing are standard off-the-shelf PC components from major manufacturers, which can be purchased at a variety local retailers and online. We’ll also provide links to our components for those of you that find an interest in our equipment.

We’d like to thank Intel and Crucial for providing vital components in this test bench, without which this report would not be possible. Check out our review of the Intel Core i7 5960X and the Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4 used in this report.

BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

To test our CPU we’ll use a variety of benchmarking tools and productivity applications including PCMark08, AIDA64, Cinebench R15, WinRAR, 7-Zip, Photoshop CC, and Handbrake. We’ll also do some gaming tests using FRAPS to measure FPS performance, and 3DMark11.

OVERCLOCKING

In our overclocking test were AIDA64’s ‘System Stability Test‘ and ‘CPUID‘ in order to verify and test our overclocking results.

After a few reboots and multiple trips to the UEFI we were able to get a rock-solid CPU overclock of 4.5GHz with a Core Voltage of 1.350v which is well within save margins for our Haswell-E based Intel Core i7 5960X, and is only slightly higher than the the 1.348v we needed to get the same CPU to 4.5GHz on our ASRock X99 OC Formula, which is a much more expensive motherboard that is built for overclocking.

Now, we’re not saying that this motherboard is as good as a top of the line overclocking board, in fact we’re quite sure that 4.5GHz is about the limit our chip can reach while still being stable, and if it were higher that board is known to be able to get to much higher clocks whereas this one would probably max out somewhere around where we are now. That being said, for a $200 motherboard with a 6-phase power design, getting a 50% overclock on massively power hungry eight-core CPU is really impressive!

STORAGE BENCHMARKS

For testing storage, we did two separate benchmarks, one with AS-SSD and another real-world file transfer between two SSDs using DiskBench to measure the results.

DISKBENCH

In this test, we copied a game directory that was over 30GB with 512 files, between two SSDs. The results are displayed in megabytes per second.

AS-SSD

The toughest benchmark available for solid state drives is AS SSD as it relies solely on incompressible data samples when testing performance.  For the most part, AS SSD tests can be considered the ‘worst case scenario’ in obtaining data transfer speeds and many enthusiasts like AS SSD for their needs.