Gigabyte X79-UD3 review

High-performance Sandy Bridge E hero

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Gigabyte X79-UD3
High-performance Sandy Bridge E hero

TechRadar Verdict

Proof you don't need a top-dollar motherboard to achieve a great high performance PC

Pros

  • +

    Aggressively priced

  • +

    Great performance

  • +

    All the features you need

Cons

  • -

    Power hungry

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Plotting a performance PC? Snag a high end motherboard. That's the conventional wisdom challenged by the new Gigabyte X79-UD3.

Of course, any board based on Intel's X79 chipset hardly rates as poverty item.

At around $260, the Gigabyte X79-UD3 ain't exactly cheap, but it is within a fiver of the cheapest X79 motherboards on the market. Everything, therefore, is relative.

Consequently, the Gigabyte X79-UD3 is flagrantly frills-free.

But with so many features now finding their way onto the the CPU die itself, including the memory controller and PCI Express bus, you could argue motherboards in general are less critical.

Gigabyte X79-UD3

So Gigabyte's task is to deliver quality and performance where it matters while not going overboard on the corner cutting compared with more expensive X79 models such as the Asus P9X79 Pro and MSI X79A-GD65 8D.

If Gigabyte can pull that off, we can certainly live without trinkets such as hardware power switches and LED displays.

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Jeremy Laird
Contributor

Technology and cars. Increasingly the twain shall meet. Which is handy, because Jeremy (Twitter) is addicted to both. Long-time tech journalist, former editor of iCar magazine and incumbent car guru for T3 magazine, Jeremy reckons in-car technology is about to go thermonuclear. No, not exploding cars. That would be silly. And dangerous. But rather an explosive period of unprecedented innovation. Enjoy the ride.