Gadgetory

it's time to review the gigabyte odd for good run it's not the gigabyte welcome back to take est belated general is brown coming back to you guys today with a video about the x99 gigabyte UD for this motherboard is definitely one of those motherboards that looks good on the surface but when you start taking a close look at this motherboard you realize that there was a lot of things that gigabyte could have done a lot better to make this motherboard a winner in my opinion but anyway let's talk about this mixed bag today we'll quickly look at what's in the box and then we'll look at the features until mic test for you guys look at some power consumption figures then we'll move on to a conclusion so soon as you have the unifor you'll notice that it is boxed extremely well and in some ways I'd say it's - a box - well and this is one of the things straight away that I noticed with the unifor it seems like this time gigabyte have really gone and spiced up the cosmedix not just with the box but with the motherboard and everything else and it feels like and this is gonna be the main theme of this review it feels like they've done that at the cost of functionality and that's my biggest gripe with this x99 new d4 is the fact that gigabyte have spiced everything up cosmetically but at the expense of taking away features which I feel our necessity on an enthusiast grade motherboard so as soon as you get the box you'll notice straight away that there's things like braided SATA cables there's a solid sli connections there for 2 3 & 4 Way SLI as well but as soon as you take the motherboard out of the actual sleeving you'll notice that it comes up it's actually a nice looking product as you see here we've got an ultra durable heatsink up the top here and then you've got the gigabyte heatsink down the bottom here with it when they're kind of going with the orange black and silver theme and it honestly doesn't look too bad like cosmetically this thing looks pretty good I think it looks like a mid-range motherboard especially on the enthusiast line and it certainly performs above that when it comes to the vrm solution so looking at the vrm solution here we've got an eight phase-- power design with two phases being for the left 4 dims and 2 phases being for the right 4 dens and then you've got four phases dedicated to the CPU itself and so this is an interesting thing right most of the other competitors are going with 12 5 power designs which generally have eight phases dedicated to the CPU and one thing I've noticed with this CPU with this vrm sorry is when it's delivering power to the CPU it does it a lot better than the competitors are doing it like the as rock and the MSI that had come through here this vrm I mean the whole thing the whole motherboard and the CPU have clocked at the same speeds at the same voltages used up about 40 to 50 maybe even 60 watts less than the msi x99s ROK x99 so gigabyte definitely know what they're doing when it comes to implementing a VRM this one's got 60 amp chokes on there I mean there's some of the best in the business there they've got decent MOSFETs again I always put good MOSFETs on their boards as well as solid 10k rated capacitors as well and now another thing about this board is it does feel really solid so we'll look at over the side here they've gone with a gray and black theme for the dims there and looking at the top here we don't have many connections we've only really got the 12-volt CPU pin connection there which I would like to see it on the other side of the board I think that's a better spot it was actually pretty hard to get to it here over the right side of the board but moving down there we've got a ATX 24 pence leave connection there we've got our 10 SATA ports there was six of them being able to be in raid configurations the for not being able there you've also got a solder Express port there on the side moving down the bottom here we've got our front panel connections there for our power HDD lights and stuff like that and another thing I will say about gigabyte is they've done with a smart design on the connections I like the fact that they put the USB front out on the bottom of the motherboard this is actually a really good spot I think the best spot besides that you've got more front USB 2 front outs there and also looking at the fan connections there it looks like we've got five faring connections in total to being cysts CPUs and three being system fans as well so as we go through the connections here we've got a TPM connection ace auxilary 4 pin connector there which is in a really nice spot and really concealed I like that again that's another good design with this motherboard moving over here we've got front panel out audio options there and then moving up here we've got a total of PCI Express lanes of 416 speed lanes there and three minis there so PCI Express one speed slots there in the middle of the board we got an m2 status spot as well as a PCI mini slot as well so they've definitely given you all the connectivity you need as well as the fact that the PCI Express slots are all evenly spaced out as well so this board will I think support up to four-way SLI or crossfire really good board in that regard though you will need a 59 30 K or a 59 60 X the 5820k will not support four-way SLI just keep that in mind so moving down the board here we'll see we've got a dual BIOS here and this is my first problem with his motherboard there's no selection switched for it so you can see here they've got a fancy led on this heat thing that put LED trace lighting on the right here that put blue LEDs on the back they've even gone to the lengths of putting white LEDs on the rear of the motherboard but they've failed to put in a simple thing like a switch for the boss they've also missing a clear CMOS switch which I really do think is a convenient thing to have on a motherboard save you're getting the screwdriver and hitting the board every time but that's something that I feel they could have instead of putting all these fancy LEDs on here they could have simply put in those two switches and I would have been a lot happier so let's look at gigabytes audio amp up technology when I put this through the hoops man it didn't do as well as the extreme six for example I feel like this is where I'm disappointed with all these LEDs and I'll keep going on about that because the mic in that was pretty good and I'll do a tester on that later but the line in that started producing noise after a volume level of 80 which I've never had that on a motherboard before they've always I've always been able to turn them up to 100 and there's been no noise on the line in this introduced is noise on the line in when we look at the audio out there again crosstalk levels that are similar to that of a 50-dollar motherboard I was surprised I was like what this is not a good experience it's a loud experience but it's not a good one the bass roll-off was also a little bit bigger than the extreme six as well so that's something that gigabyte might want to think about instead of putting fancy LEDs on maybe they should put better caps on and give you try and give the the customer a better audio experience that's one thing I'm disappointed about function they've gone with cosmetics over function which makes me disappointed so looking at the rear of this motherboard we got two ps2 ports which is actually interesting I don't know anyone who ever uses a ps2 mouse or even if you'd want to use a ps2 mouse but appears to a keyboard slot definitely a good thing we've got four USB to ports there we've got four USB 3 ports with the bottom one here being dedicated to gigabytes auto flash so if you plug it in you don't even need a CPU in there you can flash the BIOS that's actually a pretty good feature I like that below that we've got two more USB three out there and a Intel and I see there the i21 8v really good one of the best onboard and I see as you can get here we've got a 7.1 channel HD audio out here with a mic in your standard audio out and line in there and then your analog connections in an optical out so you'll notice that there is no clear CMOS which I'm disappointed about even the x99 from em aside the budget entry-level x99 board had one of these so ed let's move on I'll take a quick look at the BIOS which is actually pretty impressive and we'll talk about a problem with that as well then we'll move on to the mic test ok so here's a quick look at the BIOS there's three different modes you can choose from that it also scales to 1440p as well myself I like the classic menu as I'm just quite simply used to it and everything I know where everything is and I know all the settings from the past but there's just so much detail in this BIOS there's so many things you can do that you probably couldn't do it another bias as well however yeah and amoenus profiles and everything like that but it's just a really feature packed BIOS I really do like it and I am pretty impressed by it as well so good thing from gigabyte here okay so let's talk about the onboard audio solution quickly and just like the Xtreme six well I'm actually going to use the extreme six for this example but I'll play you guys a clip quickly from some of my previous recordings on the UD 4 directly from the motherboard line in so if you've been on the PC for a while you may have experience with a thing called a gaming headset and if you're even further into the audio well you may have experience with the thing called an audiophile grade can now the latter is in my opinion clearly better than the former that is gaming headsets just simply don't match up to a good audiophile grade can and as you can see there that was done at 30 DB at a volume of 30 or 50 sorry and there was absolutely no noise or pretty very little noise coming into the mic in so gigabyte with the UT for they've done a really good job in pretty much the same as the as work extreme sticks on the mic in and that it introduces little to no noise let's talk about the audio out though that was something that I think needs a little bit of work it was extremely loud I'd say about two times as loud as this three times as loud as most other onboard audio solutions so if you want to blow up your eardrums this onboard solution will be for you but I thought that the crosstalk levels were pretty bad it'd be similar to what some of the cheapest motherboard solutions i've heard the as well as the bass roll-off that was a little bit bad as well though the line in as well something with the line in is that after volume levels of 80 on the input it would introduce noise as well which was surprising so something I'd like to see them do is improve a little bit on the onboard audio especially when they got things like this led beat phase which I'll quickly show you guys so as you can see there it's basically a frequency where it responds to and will light up these fancy lights I wish they could have taken that away and put that sort of money into better caps and a better onboard audio solution itself so there you know that fancy fancy lights it really doesn't like I don't know who's going to be showing their motherboard at a party you know maybe a cool stereo system that might be cool but an onboard audio solution I don't know why there's fancy LED lights on it anyway so the on board early solution could use a bit of a touch-up I think though what you're hearing now is pretty much indicative of what you will hear from the gigabyte u d4 if you plug a microphone directly into the mic in so anyway let's move on now to some power consumption figures we'll look at as well the performance figures as well so now when it came to power consumption this motherboard did really well is the most efficient motherboard that I've tested out of the whole x19 I'm other wars that have come through here really efficient does a fantastic job 320 watts on a bronze rated power supply at 4 gigahertz it's about one point one one volt and so you can see when we contrast that to the x99 extreme 6 in the msi sli plus off the top of my head there are about 370 380 watts so there definitely was is definitely have a more efficient vrm solution it definitely stayed really cool and it didn't even hint of I've never heard I haven't heard any stories of them blowing out yet so you might definitely know what it definitely not they're doing when it comes to implementing a vrm solution that's one thing that we can we all know about gigabyte but other than that the performance figures when I compared a Cinebench score to the extreme 6 it lost by a little bit it's very marginal you could put that down to variants it does not matter at all these were the exact same clocks with on the memory and the CPU so nothing to be in terms of performance there's no difference between this and the extreme 6 in terms of just the motherboard itself so anyway that being said let's move on now to a conclusion where I'll talk about this mixed bag of a motherboard and I'll let you guys know what I think and some final thoughts let's move on so we conclusion what can I say about the gigabyte UT for welcome mixed bag as you guys known from the intro and that's a mixed bag because the vrm solution is you guys saw it's one of the best there is I mean you look at there's power consumption results that's impressive right beats the competitors not by just a little bit by a significant amount in my opinion so they know what they're doing when it comes to implementing a vrm solution really good job that ran cool and quiet the overclocks when the BIOS wasn't crashing the overclocks were perfectly stable over clapping this thing and the features in the bus was a breeze it was really good I liked what I liked gigabytes BIOS basically there's all the features you could ask for same with the asrock as well but when we moved on to other things like the onboard audio solution it disappointed me you know that the crosstalk levels were pretty high the line-in introduced annoys the and alls it was it was just this really loud volume and it wasn't a good it was quantity over quality basically there was things missing like the clear CMOS button there was things missing like the file selection switch which I believe in necessities on an enthusiast line motherboard looking at the other connection points though though really good the whole board was really good in terms of the connectivity things were really placed out well they've gone with a matte black look as well which is not bad and I'm glad to report that this board does not get contaminated as well so if you've seen my MSI motherboard that got contaminated this one's got the right it's been done right basically matte black that done that's done right this won't get contaminated anyway looking at other things on this motherboard yeah it's got these LEDs which I mean they do look good but the fact again if the onboard audio was good and the BIOS did not crash then this motherboard would be getting recommended if it had those buttons as well functionality and cosmetics okay but they've gone with cosmetics over functionality and that's my biggest crime with the gigabyte UD 4 I would have liked up to him get rid of all these fancy LEDs and give us a better on board OD solution a BIOS selection switch a clear CMOS and then the BIOS that doesn't crash and that's the reason I gave this board a long time before I reviewed it and I simply can't recommend because it still crashes and so if you're getting a x99 CPU like a 5820k and you're overclocking it and it starts crashing you might think that something else is wrong but it's actually the motherboards fault in this case a lot of people are messaging me like hey my gigabyte advisor crashes for me it started crashing alot but then I upgraded to the f10 BIOS and that seemed to evade only crash maybe at once every two weeks but it's still it's unacceptable for an enthusiast line product and so the reason I gave this board a good chance but it kind of failed me in a few more ways than one and it's all these little things that add up together to make it not so not a real big recommendation here anyway so if you guys want a motherboard that works I'd probably be going with the asrock series of motherboards they've done a great job on the x99 line I mean they don't look as good as the competitors in my opinion but they the function is just there these things work everything makes perfect sense with the asrock motherboards as opposed to this time around I'm just left scratching my head I mean if the boss worked and the onboard audio was better I could give this a recommendation but it's just those two things together it just really lets this motherboard down so no guys I hope you enjoyed this review if you did please give it a thumbs up if you have any questions about the gigabyte x99 ut4 then please leave a comment in the comment section below and i'll catch you guys with the review or a tech video very shortly peace out for now bye