Gadgetory

what's up guys welcome back to the channel so a few weeks back my x99 ud5 Wi-Fi board that was in my main test bed tragically passed away after a freak liquid cooling accident coping with the immeasurable loss forced me into a downward spiral marked by an unkempt appearance and poor personal hygiene I think we're still in the spiral but the kind folks over at gigabyte heroically came to my rescue by sending me a shiny new x99 new t4p so I could continue scratching my incessant benchmarking itch before I screw it down to my test bench and let the dust pile up begin however I figured I'd conduct a brief overview on the board for those of you considering a system build on Intel's enthusiast platform so what we have here is an X 99 board with a 2011 v3 socket for your haswell-e CPU that currently retails for about 270 dollars aboard the matte black PCB you get eight DIMM slots with quad-channel ddr4 memory support for kits up to 3,000 and 333 megahertz with a max capacity of 128 gigs which is sure to make us drool over the thought of readily available 16 gigabyte ddr4 modules above the socket is your VR M covered by a modest heatsink with tasteful gold accents and some ultra durable branding a heat pipe exiting the right side makes its way down and connects to the heatsink of our x99 chipset also sporting some gold flair and a yellow LED that stays lit when the board is powered on though you do have the option to turn it off by unplugging the LEDs to pin wire from the PCB you'll find plenty of SATA 3 connectivity in its usual location with six ports natively controlled by the x99 chipset but support raid zero one five and ten and to the left are four additional ports which support HCI and IDE only giving a support for a total of 10 SATA 6 gigabits per second drives we also get a single SATA Express port for such devices rounding out the storage Department gigabyte has included a dual m2 slot that supports either a SATA or PCIe m2 SSD although we're still limited by the number of PCIe m2 drives available the generous number of PCIe lanes on haswell-e assures us that this board will be well equipped for their mainstream arrival to slot accommodates em key drives measuring 60 or 80 millimeters long but bear in mind that occupying the slot will render your SATA Express and two of your ex 99 SATA ports unavailable right beside the m2 slot as an additional slot intended for an MDOT two Wi-Fi module if you wish to add one in the future as you can see here I was able to use the surviving module that came with my now deceased ud5 Wi-Fi zooming out a bit we see that both end up two slots live right in the middle of our PCI Express gen3 slots four of which being x16 slots allowing for up to four way crossfire or SLI configurations the first and third slot run at x16 speeds while the second and fourth operate at x8 this bottom slot however does share bandwidth with the top slot forcing it to run at x8 when both slots are populated if you're doing a 2-way on this board you're gonna want to use slots 1 & 3 with 3-way configurations using slots 1 3 & 4 I should also mention here that having a 5820k installed changes the operating speed of that second slot to x8 and the fourth slot to x4 due to the CPUs lower number of PCIe lanes shuffled in between the x16 slots you will also get three PCIe by one slots though I won't be pumping much audio out of this board once it's in the testbench gamers and some content creators may benefit from the onboard real text sound chip with built-in rear amplifier which supports stereo for 5.1 and 7.1 channel audio as we've seen on other similarly priced motherboards a trace outline helps to eliminate noise and interference by separating the sound chip from the other components on the board the trace also plays an aesthetic role when the various LEDs lining its path glow yellow when the system is running I'm already envisioning a white and yellow themed custom water-cooled rig with this board I'm gonna call it yellow snow if you'd rather not have the LEDs you do have the option to disable the lighting in gigabytes app center software moving on to the smaller connectors scattered about the board in the top left corner is the first of five for pin fan headers with the CPU fan header located just below the socket to the left of your vrm heatsink is the eight pin CPU plug and on the far right you'll find your 24 pin ATX connector just below that as a USB 3 port and a CPU mode switch that switches between the standard 2011 and 2083 pin socket modes which theoretically grants you hire over headroom along the bottom of the board are your front panel connectors sandwiched between two more fan headers a clear CMOS jumper 2 USB 2 connectors TPM header a 4-pin molex plug that can be used to deliver more PCIe power to your multi-gpu setups for added stability and spdif out and HD audio connectors just above the bottom PCIe slot you'll find a Thunderbolt header for add-in cards your CMOS battery and two chips indicating a dual BIOS a main BIOS which boots on default and a backup BIOS in case the other one gets damaged or becomes corrupted finally to the left of the top PCIe slot is the last fan header and a two pin connector for the LED backlight rear i/o shield which I'll show you guys in just a moment on the rear i/o you get two ps2 ports for older mice and keyboards for USB 2 ports and 6 USB 3 ports the white one takes advantage of gigabytes cue flash feature for easily updating your BIOS with a thumb drive you get an rj45 Ethernet LAN port an optical s/pdif out and mic and audio jacks for up to 7.1 channel sound lastly there's a metal antenna bracket for that optional and up to Wi-Fi module just when you thought the list was over it's time for accessories you get a user's manual installation guide a funny looking coaster for black sleeve SATA cables two of them straight the other two right angle an SLI bridge and crossfire bridge both ribbon style too hard PCB 3-way SLI bridges with varying sizes for different slot configurations a hard PCB SLI bridge for four-way setups an 8 pin cable to prevent over current protection and that backlight IO shield that lights up neon blue so you can easily see your ports when messing around with cables behind your case like the audio trace LEDs you do have the option to turn this off through gigabytes app center software or by simply leaving the 2 pin cable unplugged I was really glad to find out that I already knew my way around the board's UEFI since it is the same exact one on board the x99 gaming g1 Wi-Fi that lives inside my personal desktop it has everything you need for a basic BIOS and there's even an enthusiast mode with boatloads of additional settings for advanced CPU and memory overclocking after getting a good look at the board I finally popped it into the test bed and did some overclocking myself I was quickly able to take my 59 60 X to 4.3 gigahertz at one point to 6 volts on air using a be quiet shadow rock slim why am i cooling on air and not liquid you asked no reason when booting into the BIOS the board does boot into an easy menu you can quickly access things like boot priority or SATA controller modes but I always find myself hitting f2 right away to get into the full and familiar UEFI overall the BIOS on this board functions as it should and gave me no problems from my brief time with it my initial impressions of the x99 new d4p are that it's good and that it'll perform well for what I need it for but there were a few things missing that I would have liked to see given the current price point I mean for one I was kind of surprised at the absence of any surface mounted power or reset buttons as there seems to be plenty of space on the PCB for them to fit and though the board does come with a CMOS battery and clear CMOS jumper it just would have been nice to see a dedicated clear CMOS button for enthusiasts who would utilize it frequently but that being said this is a beautifully crafted board using high quality parts that make it worthy of its ultra durable classification and I'm definitely looking forward to start using it to conduct many many benchmarks from here on out you guys let me know what you think of this board in the comments and also which x89 motherboard is currently at the top of your list and why