A mind-blowing, fabulously over-engineered enthusiast board from GIGABYTE. One that most people will never, ever make the most of.
Stop reading this review for a moment, and click on the motherboard that lies on this very page. Take a good, long look at its form; how the seven PCIe slots lie one after another in perfect symmetry, how the immense XL-ATX size appears to be normal, fuzzied by the sheer density of components that pepper its surface. How, even through the chaos, it can still appear to have a form of order. Now, once you've peered at the board a spell, drift your gaze towards the price.
Oh. Wow. I really - six hundred!?
So, let's take a quick look at what this board actually entails. Starting at the Intel X58 Northbridge chipset, a mainstay of the enthusiast, there are two NVIDIA NF200 chipsets, themselves located adjacent to the ICH10R Southbridge. In totality the X58 offers 36 usable PCIe lanes, which the two NF200 chipsets multiply for a combined total of 72. These 72 lanes are pumped directly into seven full-length PCIe slots, four of which are electrically 16x, and all enough to power anything needed in the graphics department, however demanding. They can support either Crossfire or SLI, and there's just enough space for four dual-slot cards to be installed at any one time. The form factor does mean that the lowest, seventh PCIe slot actually resides in eighth place when compared to a standard ATX board, and very few cases are compatible (though the Haf X on page 43 can manage the bulk).
Storage options are similarly boosted, and joining the ICH10R Southbridge's six SATA2 ports are five chips: the 'GIGABYTE SATA2 chip', for two SATA2 ports and one IDE; a JMicron JMB362 chip, for two eSATA ports that reside on the rear I/O panel; an iTE IT8720, for antiquated floppy support; the Marvell 9128, for two SATA3 ports; and finally the NEC D720200F1 chip, granting two USB3. The rear panel also includes a Clear CMOS button for convenience.
Additional chips also make a showing in the form of a T.I. TSB43AB23 FireWire controller, a decent Realtek ALC889 audio chip (though nothing special) and two additional Realtek RTL8111E Gigabit Ethernet ports that support teaming.
Even if that had started to sound like an awful lot, the engineers just kept on adding more and more features into this already packed board - hard power/reset switches make a showing in addition to a LED POST screen, six fan headers are located in convenient positions around the board, twelve packet switch chips squeeze between slots for redirection of PCIe lanes (and two molex connectors to provide stability when using them all), with an excessive 24-phase power delivery system built around the LGA1366 socket - able to deliver a PSU-blowing 1500W. Thankfully you'll never be able to draw that much. Ever.
These phases are rather cleverly designed, and rather than all running at once, only twelve are activated upon boot-up in an alternating fashion. This means that each set of twelve phases are theoretically worn down one at a time, and if one fails there will be a spare set to keep things ticking.
Cooling all this is an impressively large display of copper and aluminium heatsinkery that struggles even at idle, sitting at a toasty 65 degrees. The addition of the included cooling tower that bolts above the Northbridge sooths temperatures to 59, but these components still generate a huge amount of heat that make their daily use somewhat impractical. They also affect boot-up times - with all additional chips enabled it took 27 seconds to even POST! During this period we were left quizzically puzzling about whether or not the board was functional, though thankfully when disabling the unused extraneous components POST times reduced to a few seconds.
At stock settings we see performance identical to other high-end X58 boards on the market, such as the Rampage III Extreme or UD7, and our mild overclocks don't show a huge advantage either. Overclocking further is an interesting experience, as the BIOS seemed quite precisely tuned; though it offered little help with automatic voltage settings. Voltages could be keyed in directly with enough granularity to get fine control over settings, but vDroop reared its ugly head in real-world use as 1.46875V set in and the BIOS fell to 1.392V. Interestingly the opposite occurred when using higher voltages, as the board became over-enthused, though not to the same extent as before. Ours also had a funny problem with BCLK speeds over 165MHz, not repeated with a multiplier increase suggesting motherboard troubles.
In a way it's almost harder to get a nice overclock out of this board - the heat, peculiar BIOS and odd quirks such as USB keyboard support being disabled by default all merge together to push that difficulty bar further away from the reach of the average user. We failed to generate an exceptionally noteworthy overclock under our standardised testing.
It's clear from the outset that this board is not going to be appropriate for a budget build. It's also clear that it's not suitable for a HTPC, for an office rig or for a LAN build. At no time will this board ever make sense for anything even remotely close to a real-world situation - even extreme gaming doesn't require a board anywhere near this level. This is a board that, though it does support watercooling with a built-in chipset block, really demands subzero cooling to reach its full potential. And therein lies its biggest hurdle.
Of all Atomic's readers, there are perhaps a few thousand who would consider running watercooling in a day-to-day setting. Of those who actually do go to the effort to get wet, there are a few hundred who would consider phase-change (a noisy and expensive way of chilling a processor). Of that very, very small group of extreme cooling fanatics, fewer still make the leap to liquid nitrogen cooling. Liquid nitrogen, or LN2, demands the purchase of copper pots and the hiring of actual LN2 canisters, and it is not something that most do in their spare time. In the entire country we could probably list four people who actually do it regularly for yucks - and one of them is actually a GIGABYTE employee.
That places the UD9 squarely between a rock and a very, very hard place. Technically this is the most advanced motherboard that we've ever had the pleasure of playing with, one that offers so many enthusiast features in a single package that to use them all in one sitting is almost enough to induce rapture. Realistically, this board is a hard sell, and though a few people in the world will surely get every cent from this board at the extreme end, it just doesn't make sense for 99.9 per cent of users.
If you've got the cash to drop and the willingness to pair it with the highest-end gear however, this is the only board you should buy.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012