Gigabyte X79-UD3

The Boxer

The Boxer

The Boxer

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31 Jul 2005
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27
Hi all,
I'm thinking about upgrading my old Q9550 based system and going to a X79-UD3 board and 4820K cpu, I've read that a few X79 boards suffer an issue with the BIOS which until flashed does not support the new Ivy K CPU's, is this still a problem with the Gigabyte or any other X79 based boards?
Just trying to save myself any trauma with the build, I could do to keep the budget for a mobo to £160 max as I will probably upgrade my SSD at the same time, I've also the ram to consider :mad:.
ps, what the difference between V1 and V1.1 X79 Gigabyte boards.

Thanks, Box
 
Aslong as its a revision 1.1 board it should come with a BIOS (might be some places selling older ones but all the main retailers AFAIK are shipping them with recent enough BIOS) that supports the 4820K (~F16) I'd highly reccomend flashing to F18 as it sorts a lot of small issues with the board.

Main difference with 1.1 IIRC is the updated power supply stage on the board - older boards would struggle with stable power to high end i7s when overclocked.

One issue with this board that still isn't completely solved is that the VTT and IMC voltages when using certain RAM frequency ranges will randomly ignore the set values briefly and apply default values for a few seconds for some reason (sometimes boots up ignoring them and uses defaults permanently until restart) which obviously means if your RAM requires higher than default voltages to be stable you will generally get a BSOD when this happens - it only happens however at certain frequencies so not sure if there are RAM straps or something that come into play. With the latest BIOS (F18) 1866 and 2133 RAM are 100% fine and not affected by this bug however 2400 is still somewhat problematic and so is 1600 but 1600 doesn't matter as usually your stable with default voltages at that level. (EDIT: This will probably affect CPU overclocks too if you need lots of VTT and running a combination of settings where the issue is present).
 
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Yes it's still a problem if you buy from a place with old stock, an even bigger problem with some of the Gigabyte X79 boards though is they don't overclock well (compared to Asus anyway) and you have to be careful about heatsink size because the top PCI-E slot is unusually close to the CPU socket.
 
UD3 isn't really aimed at overclocking as such anyhow - does ok for middle ground overclocks but atleast from my experience needs way too much VTT (as in potentially CPU killing levels) if you want to exceed more than about 4.6GHz fully stable on a 4820K. (Probably depends a bit CPU to CPU).
 
Cheers guy's that just the sort of info I need, is there any boards out there at a similar cost that avoids any of the problems mentioned, I will clock but I wont be over doing it, I do like a little something for nothing so if I can get 4.2 that will probably do nicely.
Thanks..
 
Trouble is with forums, if I had said I'm going for a 4770K someone would say "but surely the 4820K is better", to answer your question it ended up being a toss of a coin, nothing we buy will be perfection, it's just a case of finding a balance, some sort of compromise, just a change.
Will I even notice a difference while browsing or working with MS office "probably not", the odd game I play will be a little sharper, ENOUGH I just want to catch up with todays tech, YES tomorrow I will once again be behind and playing catch-up.

ps; I hate integrated graphics, hardly anyone uses them, it just wastes cpu power..

Take care..

Regards, Box
 
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4770K is the better choice for general use - the 4820K is a great CPU but its a more specialised platform that is only the better choice if your going to make use of some of the specific features it provides like proper bandwidth for high end multi GPU setups, access to 6+ real cores, etc.

4820K + X79-UD3 will manage 4.2GHZ with ease - I'm running mine at 4.4 but mostly coz I really don't have a need for any more speed for it - though breaking ~4.6-4.7GHz on this board is harder and harder the further you try to go past that - probably doesn't help I'm using 16GB RAM using all 4 slots. I say its a great board aslong as you stick with either 1866 or 2133MHz RAM and understand its limitations for what they are (its a no frills board not aimed at extreme overclocking) - my impressions of it would probably be more positive if the F18 BIOS had been out for it from the start as 99% of the issues I had with it went away once I put that BIOS on.
 
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@The Boxer
Most of the boards on stock should have bios supporting your CPU as this bios has been released over half a year ago.

Rev 1.0 supports up to Ivy Bridge-E, no support for Ivy Bridge-EP.
Rev 1.1 supports Ivy Bridge-EP CPUs.
 
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