Gigabye GA-X79-UD5 Preview

Item: Gigabye GA-X79-UD5 P
Author: Tom Logan

The UD5 Up Close

Published: 14th November 2011 | Source: Gigabyte | Price: £210 est | Author: Tom Logan

The UD5 Up Close

The X79-UD5 itself moves away from the powder-blue and white slots that we've come to expect from Gigabyte. Instead it switches to a largely black arrangement with the blue reduced to just appearing on the heatsinks. Unlike the other motherboards we've looked at it also hasn't got heatsinks in the areas we're used to finding them, but with nothing underneath. Instead Gigabyte have concentrated on having the aluminium only where it's needed, thus saving weight and being much more environmentally friendly.

We have three PCI Express 3.0 slots on the UD5. Two are rated at x16 and the bottom at x8.

There is a wealth of internal expansion headers. With everything being USB these days it's one of those technologies that you can never have too many of.

Storage is provided by six SATA 6Gbp/s ports (the white and the grey ones) and four SATA II. Those of you who require huge amounts of hard-drives to store all your digital entertainment will welcome having so many to choose from, especially a lot of SATA 6Gbp/s ports.

Rather than a power and reset switch next to each other the UD5 has just a power button tucked away in the top right.

The IO has just about everything one could hope to find. From left to right we have a combined PS2 port and two USBs. Then a lot all in one block. The OC button is a one-press CPU overclock. Beneath that we have buttons to select which of the dual-BIOS you wish to boot using, Backup in blue and Master in green, and below that is the CMOS clear. Moving along we have the Firewire, three USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 and e-SATA, then yet more USB 3.0, USB 2.0 and the LAN before finishing off with the audio jacks for the Realtek ALC 898.