GIGABYTE X99-UD4 Motherboard Review

From a performance perspective, we feel that motherboard benchmarking is almost useless. It’s the motherboard’s job to allow all of the installed hardware to operate at its full potential, so in theory, a $100 option shouldn’t be much (or any) slower than a $300 one. The differences in price instead comes down to the quality of the onboard components and other features.

So why do it at all? It’s because it’s important to make sure that the board we’re dealing with doesn’t lack in one particular area versus the rest. If board A performs 2% slower than board B in PCMark, for example, that’s of no concern to us – benchmark variance is a fact of life. However, if one board consistently performs weaker than the rest, that’s worthy of note – it could suggest that weaker components have been used which do not allow the hardware to operate at its full potential.

Please bear this in mind when perusing our results. Just because a board under-performs in a single test, it doesn’t mean anything in regards to its quality as a whole. Our ultimate goal here is to make sure that each board we test performs as we’d expect across the gamut of scenarios we pit them against.

	Intel LGA2011-v3 Test System
Processor	Intel Core i7-5960X – Octa-Core, 3.00GHz
Motherboard	ASUS X99-DELUXE (BIOS: ‘0801’ 09/04/2014) EVGA X99 Micro (BIOS: ‘1.06’ 09/05/2014) GIGABYTE X99-UD4 (BIOS: ‘F10’ 11/24/2014)
Memory	Corsair Vengeance DDR4-2800 @ DDR4-2400 16-16-16
Graphics	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti (GeForce 340.52 Driver)
Audio	Onboard
Storage	Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD
Power Supply	Corsair HX850W
Chassis	Corsair Obsidian 700D Full-Tower
Cooling	Noctua NH-U14S Air Cooler
Et cetera	Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Increasing the BCLK value is one way that vendors could sneak in some higher-than-stock performance numbers, so after letting the test bench sit idle for a couple of minutes, we look at the current BCLK value as according to CPU-Z.

BCLK Values	Result
ASUS X99-DELUXE	100.1 MHz
EVGA X99 Micro	99.9 MHz
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	99.9 MHz

All is kosher. Let’s move on.

General System Performance

To take a look at the “overall” performance of our PC configuration, we rely on dual Futuremark suites: PCMark 8 and 3DMark (2013).

SPECwpc 1.0	Media	Financial	Development	Energy	Sciences	General
ASUS X99-DELUXE	3.87	4.09	3.44	4.16	4.61	5.30
EVGA X99 Micro	3.64	4.03	3.12	3.79	4.37	4.36
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	4.02	4.28	3.32	3.95	4.67	4.3
Higher results are better.

PCMark 8 Suite Scores	Home	Work	Creative
ASUS X99-DELUXE	4465	5077	3474
EVGA X99 Micro	4294	4920	3409
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	4238	4915	3579
Higher results are better.

3DMark (2013)	3DMark	Graphics	Physics
ASUS X99-DELUXE	3334	3483	17247
EVGA X99 Micro	3299	3447	16243
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	3315	3462	17200
Fire Strike test. 3DMark results in points; higher is better.

As we’d expect, the variance between these three boards is small, although ASUS’ board does seem to have a slight advantage. With the SPECwpc test in particular, both the ASUS and GIGABYTE boards trade punches.

I/O Performance

To properly give the internal SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 ports a good workout, we turn to HD Tune and CrystalDiskMark.

HD Tune Pro 5	Minimum	Average	Maximum	Latency
ASUS X99-DELUXE	290.5	373.0	416.6	0.093ms
EVGA X99 Micro	247.8	332.9	367.2	0.100ms
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	249.4	350.9	394.4	0.092ms
Min/Avg/Max results in MB/s; higher is better. Latency results in ms; lower is better.

CrystalDiskMark	Read Seq.	Read 4K	Write Seq.	Write 4K
ASUS X99-DELUXE	515.3	36.68	315.4	106.8
EVGA X99 Micro	499.6	34.53	312.2	110.4
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	492.4	34.27	330.7	106.3
All results in MB/s.

CrystalDiskMark USB 3.0	Read Seq.	Read 4K	Write Seq.	Write 4K
ASUS X99-DELUXE	432.0	27.17	286.5	59.71
EVGA X99 Micro	238.2	22.84	237.8	42.83
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	242.05	22.99	240.58	41.77
All results in MB/s.

I don’t know what ASUS is feeding its SATA chipsets, but for the past couple of motherboard generations, its boards have consistently performed better than the others. Will these small differences be noticeable in the real-world? I certainly wouldn’t think so, but like most of the benchmarks on this page, it’s simply interesting to note.

Where ASUS really shines is with the USB 3.0 test, as on its boards, we have the option to enable the UASP protocol. Why that’s not a standard option on the other boards, I’m not quite sure. Again, though, unless you are copying data all day long, the boosted performance might not be that noticeable. Still, I’d rather faster, if given the option.

Rendering & Image Manipulation

Writing files to disk or reading a website doesn’t do much to exercise our CPU, so for that, we turn to a few common scenarios – image editing, video rendering, music conversion, and 3D rendering.

Adobe Lightroom 5.5	Result
ASUS X99-DELUXE	435 s
EVGA X99 Micro	464 s
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	459 s
Results in seconds; lower is better.

Adobe Premiere Pro CC	Result
ASUS X99-DELUXE	575 s
EVGA X99 Micro	608 s
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	577 s
Results in seconds; lower is better.

Autodesk 3ds Max 2015	Result
ASUS X99-DELUXE	674 s
EVGA X99 Micro	723 s
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	678 s
Results in seconds; lower is better.

Cinebench R15	OpenGL	CPU
ASUS X99-DELUXE	142.05	1416
EVGA X99 Micro	138.31	1331
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	140.11	1397
Higher results are better.

dBpoweramp R15	FLAC to MP3
ASUS X99-DELUXE	463 s
EVGA X99 Micro	491 s
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	466 s
500 FLAC to 320Kbps MP3.

HandBrake 0.99	Result
ASUS X99-DELUXE	1880 s
EVGA X99 Micro	1998 s
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	1880 s
Results in seconds; lower is better.

POV-Ray	Single	Multi
ASUS X99-DELUXE	333.95	2872.56
EVGA X99 Micro	320.90	2699.90
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	333.53	2862.15
Higher results are better.

This set of tests highlights an obvious trend. For some reason, EVGA’s board consistently falls behind the other two boards each and every time, whereas the ASUS and GIGABYTE are pretty well neck-and-neck. Great performance all around, but the EVGA trends are hard to ignore.

Sub-system Performance

For memory and CPU testing, we utilize SiSoftware’s Sandra 2015.

Sandra 2015 (Memory)	Integer	Float
ASUS X99-DELUXE	50.346 GB/s	51.203 GB/s
EVGA X99 Micro	48.359 GB/s	48.986 GB/s
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	51.160 GB/s	52.395 GB/s
Int/Float/Cache results in GB/s; higher is better.

Sandra 2015 (Arithmetic)	Dhrystone	Whetstone
ASUS X99-DELUXE	318 GIPS	186 GFLOPS
EVGA X99 Micro	298 GIPS	176 GFLOPS
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	311 GIPS	187 GFLOPS
Higher is better.

Sandra 2015 (Multi-core)	Bandwidth	Latency
ASUS X99-DELUXE	55.67 GB/s	52.0 ns
EVGA X99 Micro	47.93 GB/s	53.4 ns
GIGABYTE X99-UD4	55.71 GB/s	52.2 ns
Bandwidth results; higher is better. Latency results; lower is better.

Once again, EVGA’s board falls a bit behind here (for reasons unknown), but overall, there’s great performance from all three boards here. While faster memory really isn’t important for most people, I admit it’s still nice to see performance peak at about 50GB/s. To put that into perspective, I hit 9.9GB/s on the last memory kit I reviewed seven-years-ago.

Final Thoughts

GIGABYTE’s X99-UD4 motherboard hits the “sweet-spot” when it comes to features and pricing. While the board today hovers around the ~$250 mark, it can regularly be found for less. As I write this, Newegg has the board listed for $245, and then offers a $20 mail-in rebate on top of it.

Like the ASUS X99-DELUXE board I took at look at in February, I’ve spent a lot of time with GIGABYTE’s X99-UD4, and overall, I don’t have much to complain about. The board looks good, has a great, common-sense design, and has a decent EFI / software implementation as well. Functionality-wise, it delivers all of what I’d expect an X99 board of this price range to.

GIGABYTE offers two boards above this one that might be worth considering if you don’t mind shelling out another $20 or $40. The X99-Gaming 5 board, for example, costs about $20 more, but caters more towards gamers. It offers a very similar feature set to the UD4, but has a catered audio solution, as well as Killer E2201 Ethernet (I actually consider that a downside, but some gamers might prefer it). The UD5 costs $40 more, so it’s not a great contender, but it offers dual Intel NICs, dual M.2 slots, as well as Wi-Fi (which hogs an M.2 slot).

But enough of other boards. For its price-point, I think the X99-UD4 is a fantastic option for a new build. As I said above, it succeeds in being a “sweet spot” board – it doesn’t go overboard, but it doesn’t sacrifice anything important, either.

Pros

• Great “sweet-spot” board (well-priced).
• Performance is great.
• Good layout and design.
• Lots of on-board functionality.
• Supports quad-GPU.
• Sleeved SATA cables is a nice touch.
• Main EFI interface is excellent (in looks and use.)
• LED-lit I/O panel – if you’re into that sort of thing.

Cons

• EFI can be a bit buggy at times.
• GIGABYTE really needs to add a comprehensive fan-tuning utility in its EFI.
• A minor complaint, but I wish six fan headers was standard on $200+ motherboards.

GIGABYTE X99-UD4 Motherboard