![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, December 28, 2011
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Gigabyte X79-UD5 LGA 2011 Motherboard Review
Gigabyte brings us another beautiful board in the form of the X79-UD5. Should this board be on your short list or is beauty only PCB deep? See how this LGA 2011 socket board stacks up with the Sandy Bridge E boards we have seen so far. This UD5 model is feature rich for a decent price, but, does it blend?
Gigabyte Easy Tune 6
Gigabyte included its Easy Tune 6 software with the X79-UD5. For better or for worse GBT has been using it for some time. I’ve had mixed results using it since it came out. On some boards it works well and responds just as you would expect. On others many of the features, sliders, and options don’t seem to work at all. The application is essentially organized by categorical tabs at the top of the application window. They are CPU, Memory, Tuner, Graphics, Smart, and HW Monitor. In our example, the graphics tab was grayed out and unusable. This used to work (albeit with mixed results) with any graphics card, but wasn’t available. It’s possible our card was unsupported or it was a non-Gigabyte board. I’m uncertain as to what the reason behind being unable to use this feature was in this instance. The 9800GX2 I used is an older card and may simply be unsupported. Its dual GPU nature could also be behind that.
The application begins on the Tuner tab. The CPU and memory tabs are purely informational There are no settings there, so the turner tab is really the first one we can actually do anything with. There are three modes to this part of the application. Quick Boost, easy, and advanced. The quick boost mode has three quick overclocking profiles to get you started. There is a "default" button as well but it’s located above the CPU information. Given the stock turbo frequency of our 3930K reaching 3.9GHz on some work loads, the 1st setting of 4.00GHz isn’t much of an improvement. Setting 2 kicks things up to 4.20GHz and setting 3 reaches 4.40GHz.
The last option is really the only semi-respectable overclock out of the bunch. That being said, this mode is really for beginners, not seasoned overclockers. The easy mode changes the application window by quite a bit introducing more tabs and more settings. On the frequency tab we have our CPU power on and target frequencies. We only have one settings slider which increases our BCLK speed. We can also see our memory and base clock ratio, but can’t alter them here. Once we click on our advanced mode button we get sliders allowing us to adjust our base clock ratio and memory speed.
Our ratio tab allows us to adjust our CPU core turbo ratios either by individual core or as a group. However this behavior is governed by how the board is configured in the BIOS. We can only alter the turbo frequencies here if the "Enable real time ratio change" check box is clicked. Changing this value will result in a reboot and once you’re back up and running you can adjust the CPU core speed in real-time. Only problem I had with this is that the application wouldn’t always update the CPU speeds after you applied the settings change using the "Set" button at the bottom. CPU-Z always reflected the change once it was made. We also have two voltage tabs which appeared once the advanced button was used. We have a ton of voltage options and sliders all available for tweaking. There is also a nice reset button next to each one should you want to revert to the board’s defaults as a baseline.
We have our CPU Vcore, CPU Vtt, CPU PLL, IMC, DRAM voltage, PCH Core voltage and many, many more. The voltage II tab is interesting as it only shows our PCH 1.5v value and that’s all. Gigabyte could have split the values between the two pages and cleaned it up a bit. I’m not sure why they didn’t.
Going back a bit, we can see our CPU tab. It pretty much matches what you see in CPU-Z. It does relocate the motherboard information to the same window though. The memory tab of course contains our SPD information. This also strongly resembles CPU-Z. The Smart tab has our fan settings. There are three tabs that show up for our CPU, Fan 1 and Fan 2 settings. Here you can set the duty cycle and target temperature for each fan. The set button at the bottom confirms your selection. The HW Monitor no doubt stands for "Hardware Monitor". Here we get two more tabs. One for voltage and one for Fan / Temp monitoring. You can adjust the scan time which determines how often the sensor data is updated. From the Fan / Temp tab we can set our temperature and fan speed warning thresholds. You can also browse for a specific sound file if you want a custom alert tone.