GIGABYTE X79-UD3 claims Tom’s Hardware APPROVED Award

The great granddaddy of all PC hardware sites, Tom’s Hardware, has just published an article comparing seven X79 boards in the $260-320 price segment, including very own X79-UD3 board. Reviewer Thomas Soderstrom puts all seven boards through their paces comparing overall performance, features sets, overclocking prowess and value for money. We’re absolutely delighted to see that our X79-UD3 has been selected for Tom’s prestigious Approved Award.

“The least-expensive of today’s contenders, the X79-UD3 still includes a standard set of mid-market enthusiast features, such as front- and rear-panel USB 3.0, eSATA, and two additional SATA 6Gb/s ports via a third-party controller. Gigabyte goes one step further, though, by endowing this product with four-way SLI support, rather than the three-way capability we'd expect to find on a more affordable platform”

Available on New Egg for around $270, Tom’s Hardware is clearly very impressed with the wealth of high-end features on this board combined with a very competitive price point.

You can catch the full and detailed review on Tom’s Hardware here.

More details and specs for the X79-UD3 can be found here.

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GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD5 Claims Silver at Bjorn3D

Our upper mainstream Intel Z68 motherboard has been put through its paces by Joe Gulczinski over on Bjorn3D.com. Joe was impressed enough to award the Z68XP-UD5 the silver award:

“The performance of the GA-Z68XP-UD5 was never lacking in leveraging every bit power from the Sandy Bridge; as for the overclocking, for once the experience was refreshing and easy instead of tedious trial and error to get everything set perfect. For the price range of approximately $270, the discerning user would be hard pressed to not opt for this motherboard, contrasted to last generation's P67 chipset. Of course there are much cheaper Z68 motherboards; however, this board has great quality components. From the liquid cooled heatsink to the state-of-the-art VRM's, a lot of care and attention to details went into manufacturing.

Overall, GIGABYTE's GA-Z68XP-UD5 is a rock solid performer.”

To read the review in full, go to the Bjorn3D site here.

You can read up on the Z68XP-UD5 motherboard here.

Read this blog entry in Chinese (中文版) here.

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A75-UD4H claims TweakTown overclocking award

Shane Baxtor over on TweakTown.com just finished up his review of our A75-UD4H motherboard. Shane was impressed with the board, not least because he managed a nice healthy overclock on his AMD A8-3850 APU, hitting 3.7GHz from a stock 2.9GHz. Here’s a sample of what Shane had to say:

For the GIGABYTE A75-UD4H we'll be testing our A8-3850 both at stock and overclocked form, so before we get into the benchmark side of things let's first see what's going on with the overclock on offer. For weeks now GIGABYTE have been releasing details on their motherboards and overclocking results with the A8-3850. Prior to launch they had managed to break IGP records that focused on the onboard graphics side of things. With so much talk about overclocking on the GIGABYTE prior to the launch, I had high hopes for the platform when it came to overclocking and looking below, you can see it didn't disappoint.

Pushing our A8-3850 to just over 3.7GHz is no easy task, but no doubt GIGABYTE have done a good job in the BIOS and the board itself to make sure the overclocking potential is present. We ended up with our bus speed at 131MHz and we managed to leave the multiplier at the stock x29.

Shane also notes that the addition of a Dual-Link DVI port supporting resolutions of up to 2560 x 1600 pixels also makes the A75-UD4H a more attractive platform for folks with 30” monitors.

Feature wise the A75-UD4H offers us everything we want, but one of the more stand out features on it would have to be the fact that GIGABYTE have opted for a Dual-Link DVI connector on the back of their board. For a lot of people this might not be a huge issue, but what I like about it is the fact that you could use a 30" monitor with the system and not have a need for an extra video card.

While gaming at 2560 x 1600 is going to be out of the question, the fact that you could build a small, low powered system that doesn't have the need for another separate video card is impressive. From a productive perspective this is great as you can have a high resolution desktop which gives you plenty of room and build a system that's not only inexpensive, but inexpensive to run due to the fact its power draw is so low.

Check out the full review over on TweakTown.com

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