Packaging & Appearance

As with the Gigabyte EX58-UD5 (reviewed here), the UD4P is packaged in a white box with a holographic weave effect. The front of the box is plastered with emblems and advertisements of the features of the motherboard. Taking pride of place though is the Ultra Durable badge informing the prospective buyer that the EX58-UD4P has 2oz of copper in the PCB, Japanese solid capacitors Lower RDS(on) Mosfets and Ferrite core chokes. Flipping the box over we see that the features are explained in greater depth. Despite the UD4P being a mid range board it's as feature packed as any high end board on the market at the moment.

Removing the outer sleeve and opening the plain white reinforced box we come to the accessories of the motherboard. Gigabyte include an I/O shield, 4x SATA cables, e-SATA cables, IDE and floppy cables as well as a small (dual) and large (triple) SLI bridge. Aside from the obligatory driver CD and manual, Gigabyte also include 3 other manuals for you to peruse should you need further instruction on setting the motherboard up for the first time.

The motherboard itself is very similar to the UD5 but there are a few discreet differences. The colour scheme is the much improved blue/white affair but Gigabyte have still seen fit to throw a little extra colour into the mix with couple of orange PCIe slots. The only other ports that really stick out like a sore thumb are the USB ports. It's a crying shame that the whole board could not be matched up to one colour scheme as the blue/white is very attractive, spoilt only by the orange and yellow ports. Still this is a far cry from the days of the rainbow coloured Gigabyte boards of old so they are to be applauded for that.

The CPU socket area is very cluttered thanks to the 12 Phase power delivery. All of the chokes are ferrite core ensuring stable clean power is supplied to the CPU even under the highest load conditions, this along with solid capacitors should also ensure that the motherboard will still be going strong long after the socket has become obsolete. The six memory slots support triple channel DDR3 up to a maximum of 24GB.

Onto the PCIe area and we find that from top to bottom there are: PCIex1, PCIex4, PCIe 2.0 x16, PCI, PCIe 2.0 x16, PCI and PCIe 2.0 x8. All of the 16/8x PCIe slots are CrossfireX/SLI compatible and both the blue slots will provide the full 16 lanes. However, when a third card is added to the bottom slot then the second blue slot along with the orange slot drop down to 8 lanes. At present this has very little effect on todays GPUs as there is no requirement for 16 lanes on PCIe 2.0. 8x PCIe 2.0 provides roughly the same bandwidth of PCIe 1.1 x16 so this is a bit of a none issue. Perhaps only the dual GPU cards would be hindered by 8 lanes but as these cards can't be run in Tri configuration this is a none issue.

The UD4P is missing 2 SATA parts that it's bigger brother has however, as they are on the Gigabyte SATA2 controller I doubt they will be missed too much, especially as the board still has 6 SATA ports on the Intel ICH10R controller and a further 2 on the Gigabyte SATA2, not to mention the eSATA ports available.

The I/O area of the boards has plenty (8) USB ports, a single Gigabit LAN port, 7.1 audio courtesy of 6x 3.5mm jacks, S/PDIF, Firewire and 2 PS/2 ports. There's also a handy CMOS reset button allowing the user to reset the BIOS should the settings create instability. Toward the bottom of the board there are two USB sockets and a further two fire wire ports. The motherboard header area is colour coded to ensure ease of connection but sadly no quick connector is provided. Above these is an IDE port that while rapidly becoming obsolete is still frequently used by those with older hardware.

The UD4P features 2 BIOS chips that can recover a corrupt flash with the redundant BIOS chip re-flashing the corrupt one should the need arise. Next to these chips is a floppy drive port. While the floppy port is rarely used for anything other than a BIOS flash these days, some people swear by this method of BIOS flashing and are reluctant to try any other method. To the top right of the board is a power on/off and reset switch. I would liked to have seen the reset switch be something more than a tiny little button as it can be fiddly to use. Never the less it's great that Gigabyte have considered those who run motherboards out of the box so to speak.

Removing the Aluminium heatpiped which snakes along the motherboard was a relatively simple affair with the two Mosfet coolers being a push pin design and the QPI (NB) and Southbridge held fast by spring loaded screws. This design ensures that there is a near perfect mount and thanks to the generous amount of paste used the mount was indeed very good. The Mosfets transfer heat by the means of thermal tape which again is the perfect material for the uneven surfaces of the Mosfets.

Sadly, one area which has seen a budget restraint is the heat sink cooler. On the surface, the gun metal grey looks attractive enough but the Aluminium material used is not as good as copper for transferring heat. Hopefully this won't have too much of an effect on the cooling of the motherboard as the thick finned cooler certainly does not have as much surface area as the more expensive Gigabyte boards.

So there you have it, a very attractive motherboard with only a few discreet differences between it and the UD5. The packaging could be improved, especially in the way the accessories are packaged as they are simply separated from the motherboard  by a loose layer of cardboard. This is packaging at its most basic and something Gigabyte would do well to change as they are slowly falling behind in this area when compared to other manufacturers. Beauty is only skin deep though and thankfully there has not been too much cost cutting where it counts, the motherboard itself.

Let's take a look at the brains behind the board, the Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T) section of the Gigabyte EX58 - UD4P's BIOS...

BIOS Features

Starting the board up, the first screen we come across after the VGA has initialized is the Full Screen Logo which in effect is the same as the UD5 albeit a red/pink blur instead of a purple one. The section we are most interested in is the MIT (Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker) as this is where we find all the overclocking options and performance tweaks for the UD4P.

Those who are familiar with the Gigabyte BIOS of old will feel right at home here despite the lack of FSB controls. These are replaced with a combination of Base Clock (Bclk), QPI and Uncore controls. For all intents and purposes just adjusting the Bclk will serve most needs, leaving the QPI and Uncore settings on Auto which auto adjusts depending on your clockspeed. All of the major CPU features can be enabled/disabled in it's own section.

The BIOS is very user friendly and can be navigated by the arrow keys. Pressing enter on the required setting will bring up a new window as with the QPI Link speed below showing all the available options. To save time if you know your required setting you can simply scroll through them via +/- keys or input the setting directly as with the voltages. One noteworthy point I would make however, is that some settings are repeated depending on which section of the BIOS you are in at that time (See both screenshots below).

The Uncore frequency is adjusted by the means of multipliers with a maximum of x18 available. Once this multiplier is used then the readout is changed to reflect this new value below the adjustment. A ridiculous Base Clock value of 1200 is available should you be an overclocking Deity but the base clock increases/decreases by single numbers for the mere mortals out there.

The Advanced Clock Control section fine tunes some of the motherboards frequencies such as the PCIe bus speed. Clock drives and skew can also be fine tuned in this section too along with C.I.A.2 (CPU Intelligent Accelerator 2) which allows automatic overclock to values of Disabled, Cruise, Sports, Racing, Turbo and Full thrust,overclocking your CPU by 0, 5-7%, 7-9%, 9-11%, 15-17% and 17-19% respectively. Another auto overclocking utility is the Performance enhance setting (Stand, Turbo, Extreme) which Gigabyte claim changes your PC's performance to basic, Good and extreme performance respectively.

As with Uncore and QPI, Memory bandwidth is controlled by multipliers numbered  6 through 18 i.e a 200 Bclk with an 8x Multi will results in your memory running at 1600MHz - simples! (insert Meerkat wink here). Memory timings are very thorough thanks to the Gigabyte method of setting the latency for each individual channel. While only the main 5 options are available, opening up the advanced DDR timings selection allows a multitude of sub-timings for you to fiddle with until the early hours.

The Voltage section is very comprehensive allowing a massive amount of on-board device configuration. Not only that but the serious amount of voltages allowed could very easily damage your components and motherboard so use with extreme caution. Thankfully Gigabyte remind you when you are being a tad ambitious with colour coded warnings, yellow, purple and red depending on the severity of the voltage selected.

The PC Health screen is perhaps the one section I was a little disappointed in due to the lack of configuration for the 6 on board fan headers. The fan speeds are either controlled by the motherboard or set to run full tilt. Warning are given should your fan fails which is a welcome inclusion but I wish they had actually considered the fact some fan headers might need extra configuration with true adjustable speeds. A screen missing from other motherboards is the security chip configuration screen (default = disabled). Enabling this screen will allow you to make use of the TDP features of the UD4P.

Notice I mentioned earlier that Gigabyte remind you of excessive voltages used by colour coding the resultant setting, well they also present a nice little reminder on the save CMOS screen depicting which setting is causing concern. In my case I had set my DDR3 voltage to 1.66v, this reminder would have been welcome were it not for the fact that this board seemed incapable of setting the Vdimm to the recommended value of 1.65. 1.64 or 1.66 were my only choices. Plucking up the courage I decided to risk it for a biscuit and saved the settings regardless.

Flashing the BIOS was a breeze and perhaps the best method I have encountered thus far with a motherboard. Simply download the BIOS to your desktop, unpack the contents to a USB stick and on reboot hit F8 which takes you to the BIOS flash screen allowing you to save your current BIOS or flash to a new one. I did not flash the BIOS via windows although Gigabyte do allow for this method. After a number of failed BIOS flashes, I would not recommend using this method, especially when flashing via USB stick is so straightforward.

Well thats about it for the BIOS so I'll move straight on to the Test setup and overclocking section where we will find out exactly how this board performs...

 

 

 

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility capable of benchmarking the performance of individual components inside a PC. Each of the benchmarks below were run a total of five times with the highest and lowest scores being discarded and an average being calculated from the remaining three.

 

 

SuperPI is the benchmark of choice for many overclockers. It's lightweight to download and can give a quick indication on how good a system is at number crunching. Once again, testing was performed a total of 5 times, with an average being calculated from the middle three results.

 

 

 

PassMark is a popular benchmarking suite which test all aspect of PC hardware.The CPU test examines Mathematical operations, compression, encryption, SSE, 3DNow! instructions and more. Each CPU test was performed a total of 5 times, with an average being calculated from the middle three results.

 

Results Analysis

No astounding results were to be had with the run of CPU benchmarks. The UD4P scored an average run in all of the tests neither finishing top or bottom. Not a bad results considering the strong competition.

 

Let's see if there is anything to separate the board with our run of memory benchmarks...

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility capable of benchmarking the performance of individual components inside a PC. Each of the benchmarks below were run a total of five times with the highest and lowest scores being discarded and an average being calculated from the remaining three.

 

 

 

 

Everest is in many ways similar to Sisoft Sandra. Focusing mainly on software and hardware information reporting, Everest also comes with a benchmark utility suitable for testing the read, write and latency performance of the memory subsystem. Each of these benchmarks were performed a total of 5 times with the highest and lowest scores being discarded and an average calculated from the remaining three.
 

 

 

 

Results Analysis

Again, nothing startling from the UD4P scoring in the middle sector of the motherboards on test. The UD4P did however, get the best latency score so it remains to be seen if this has a positive effect on the other benchmarks I'll be running today.

Let's see how the boards perform in our Hard Drive benchmarks...

 

HDTach is a free hard disk benchmarking program from SimpliSoftware. This benchmark is not only capable of producing results on hard disk access times but also CPU usage required during disk access. The "Long bench" was run a total of 5 times with the highest and lowest results being omitted and an average calculated from the remaining 3 results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility capable of benchmarking the performance of individual components inside a PC. Each of the benchmarks below were run a total of five times with the highest and lowest scores being discarded and an average being calculated from the remaining three.

 

 

 

Results Analysis

The hard drive benchmarks are always going to be a close run test with all the boards on test being based on the Intel ICH10R controller. With very little to choose between the motherboards, the UD4P did however manage to out pace a most of the boards on test albeit by a small margin but certainly by nothing 'noticeable' in real world conditions.

Let's see how the motherboard performs with our multimedia benchmark suite...

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility capable of benchmarking the performance of individual components inside a PC. Each of the benchmarks below were run a total of five times with the highest and lowest scores being discarded and an average being calculated from the remaining three.
 

 

 

Cinebench 10 is a benchmarking tool based on the powerful 3D software Cinema 4D. The suite uses complex renders to gauge the performance of the entire PC system in both single-core and multi-core modes. Testing was performed a total of 5 times with the highest and lowest results being omitted and an average created from the remaining 3 results.

 

 

 

 

 

3DMark is a popular synthetic gaming benchmark used by many gamers and overclockers to gauge the performance of their PC's. All 3DMark runs were performed a total of 5 times with the highest and lowest results being removed and an average calculated from the remaining 3 results. Also included are the CrossfireX results to give an indication of how 8x PCIe lanes perform.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Results Analysis

Cinebench did not throw up anything unusual but 3DMark was a different story altogether. The UD4P outscored all of the motherboards in all tests and by a fair margin which is a fantastic achievement. I was suspicious of the results but after checking and double checking the driver versions and ensuring nothing funny was going on I had to go by the results I got. Excellent 3D Performance!

Let's see how it gets on in our run of real world gaming...

 

Crysis is without doubt one of the most visually stunning and hardware-challenging games to date. By using CrysisBench - a tool developed independently of Crysis - we performed a total of 5 timedemo benchmarks using a GPU-intensive pre-recorded demo. To ensure the most accurate results, the highest and lowest benchmark scores were then removed and an average calculated from the remaining three.
 

 

 

Call of Duty 4 is a stunning DirectX 9.0c based game that really looks awesome and has a very full feature set. With lots of advanced lighting, smoke and water effects, the game has excellent explosions along with fast game play. Using the in-built Call Of Duty features, a 10-minute long game play demo was recorded and replayed on each of the GPU's using the /timedemo command a total of 5 times. The highest and lowest FPS results were then removed, with an average being calculated from the remaining 3 results.

 

 
 

Ubisoft has developed a new engine specifically for Far Cry 2, called Dunia, meaning "world", "earth" or "living" in Parsi. The engine takes advantage of multi-core processors as well as multiple processors and supports DirectX 9 as well as DirectX 10. Running the Far Cry 2 benchmark tool the test was run 5 times with the highest and lowest scores being omitted and the average calculated from the remaining 3.
 

Results Analysis

Despite outperforming all of the boards in 3DMark, the Gigabyte EX58-UD4P could not replicate those results in the real world gaming tests. In fact, for COD4 it showed terrible performance in comparison though that does appear to be a one off as the motherboard performed on a par with the others in Far Cry 2 and Crysis.

Let's take a look at it's overall performance...

PCMark Vantage is the latest benchmarking suite from Futuremark. Differing significantly from their 3DMark suites, PCMark performs a series of benchmarks designed to recreate and benchmark scenarios of a PC being used for everyday tasks. Vantage has a Vista only requirement as it actually relies on several different components from the OS in order to run correctly.

While the Gigabyte hardly blew the competition away it did manage to come out on top in 5 of the 6 tests in PCMark Vantage, a feat not managed by any other board previously tested at OC3D. Interestingly, Vantage puts the Gigabyte top of the pile in the gaming result which goes to show you should never fully trust synthetic benchmarks as in real world test the Gigabyte was mediocre. However, as the results above show, the Gigabyte board is a solid performer in all the tests we ran today.

Let's head over to the conclusion where I attempt to put today's testing into perspective...