GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 LGA2011 Motherboard Review
The GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 isn't aimed at the budget minded individual. It currently carries a price tag of $369.99 plus shipping. Are you getting what you pay for? In short, absolutely. The GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 is packed full of features that make it worth every one of your hard earned dollars. GIGABYTE has made some very solid improvements over the previous generation of Sandy Bridge motherboards that simply add to the overall package. My personal favorite is the addition of the GIGABYTE 3D BIOS. The GIGABYTE 3D BIOS was very easy to use and navigate through. Whether you use the board layout and select which area you want to tweak, or the more traditional style BIOS that you can navigate through and find the settings you want to work on. It was a pleasure to work in. With that being said, there were a few quirks in the 3D BIOS that we discovered during our testing today.
The Legit Reviews test bench uses a Razer Copperhead mouse. The Razer Copperhead mouse is a bit on the dated side and was cycled out of office computer and replaced with a Logitec G5 gaming mouse. What we noticed in the 3D BIOS was that with the original F2 BIOS when the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 was fired up for the first time we didn't have the ability to use the Razer Copperhead mouse. This wasn't a deal breaker for me, as I still tend to click through the BIOS using the arrow keys on the keyboard. When I went to enter the Q-Flash to update the BIOS to the latest F8 BIOS revision, I couldn't get to the Q-Flash icon without using the mouse. That did frustrate me a little bit. If this had been installed into a case and tucked into a desk I would have had to pull it out, unplug the Razer Copperhead and try a different mouse. Fortunately running the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 on the test bench this wasn't an issue, for some though I could see it being an issue, or at least a project. Fortunately there are plenty of mice to choose from around here. The closest USB mouse was the Logitec G5 gaming mouse in the office computer. Once we plugged that into the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 we had full mouse control in the 3D BIOS. If we didn't have a second mouse readily available we would have had to use an alternate method to flash the BIOS. We've used the GIGABYTE @BIOS in the past without fail, but after I bricked a couple of different boards (none in recent years) using windows flash utilities in the past that's one way I try to avoid flashing the BIOS. Now that we were able to update the BIOS to the F8 revision we put the right mice where they belong and fired the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD back up and headed back into the BIOS. The Razer Copperhead would now move the mouse cursor, but it wasn't orientated right, try and move it up and it would go right, down and left. I did end up just navigating through the 3D BIOS with the keyboard, it would have been nice to have the mouse available to me though.
The Legit Reviews test bench uses a Razer Copperhead mouse. The Razer Copperhead mouse is a bit on the dated side and was cycled out of office computer and replaced with a Logitec G5 gaming mouse. What we noticed in the 3D BIOS was that with the original F2 BIOS when the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 was fired up for the first time we didn't have the ability to use the Razer Copperhead mouse. This wasn't a deal breaker for me, as I still tend to click through the BIOS using the arrow keys on the keyboard. When I went to enter the Q-Flash to update the BIOS to the latest F8 BIOS revision, I couldn't get to the Q-Flash icon without using the mouse. That did frustrate me a little bit. If this had been installed into a case and tucked into a desk I would have had to pull it out, unplug the Razer Copperhead and try a different mouse. Fortunately running the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 on the test bench this wasn't an issue, for some though I could see it being an issue, or at least a project. Fortunately there are plenty of mice to choose from around here. The closest USB mouse was the Logitec G5 gaming mouse in the office computer. Once we plugged that into the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD7 we had full mouse control in the 3D BIOS. If we didn't have a second mouse readily available we would have had to use an alternate method to flash the BIOS. We've used the GIGABYTE @BIOS in the past without fail, but after I bricked a couple of different boards (none in recent years) using windows flash utilities in the past that's one way I try to avoid flashing the BIOS. Now that we were able to update the BIOS to the F8 revision we put the right mice where they belong and fired the GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD back up and headed back into the BIOS. The Razer Copperhead would now move the mouse cursor, but it wasn't orientated right, try and move it up and it would go right, down and left. I did end up just navigating through the 3D BIOS with the keyboard, it would have been nice to have the mouse available to me though.
Test Setup:
BenchMarks:
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- 3D BIOS coming in this motherboard is really awsome.
- Full of General Features... USB3.0, SATA 3.0 as well as PCIe3 to run even 4 way SLI/ Cross Fire.
- 2400mhz memory is supported very well.
- Great Overclocking mode performance with CPU as well as with GPUs.
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- Price is a little bit 10-20 dollars high but its a performance motherboard.
- It does not perform well in the benchmarks as does not perform fully as expected from Gigabyte.
