Hello People!
I am back with another exciting product for you guys. Today I take a look at Gigabyte’s latest offering for Core 2 platform, the Gigabyte EP45 UD3P motherboard.
This motherboard is based on Gigabyte’s Ultra Durable 3 PCB design based on Intel’s P45 chipset to replace Ultra Durable 2 design it has been using for a while now. The P45 chipset itself is not that new, and there are plenty of boards already out based on this chipset including Gigabyte’s own EP45 series boards.
So why did Gigabyte launch this board now nearing the end of the Core 2 era? Or is there any point to bring this board out now at all? Let’s find out.
[BREAK=Ultra Durable 3]
The Ultra Durable 3
Gigabyte has been saying a lot about its UD3 design. And it’s equally interesting as well. So what is this all about?
The Ultra Durable 3 design incorporates 4 key components
1. 2oz Copper inner layer
2. 50,000 hours all solid Japanese capacitors
3. Lower rds(on) Mosfet design
4. Ferrite Core chokes
[BREAK=Ultra Durable 3 In Detail]
Ultra Durable 3 In Detail
Let’s take close look at the benefits of these components
2oz Copper Inner Layer
• 50°C cooler than traditional 1oz motherboards
• Enhanced Durability
• Improved energy efficiency
• Better overclocking
• Lower impedance ( upto 2 times lower )
Japanese Solid Capacitors
• Better durability
• Longer life
Lower RDS(on) Mosfet
• Lower resistance
• Lower power consumption
• Lower heat
Ferrite Core Choke
• Better efficiency
• Low energy loss
That’s that. Let’s quickly go through the motherboard Specifications.
[BREAK=Specifications]
Specifications
CPU Support : Intel Core 2, Pentium D, Pentium 4 5xx and 6xx, Celeron D 3xx and 4xx, Pentium DC
Memory Support: 4x Dual Channel DDR2 Slots Supporting DDR2 1366+
Chipset: Intel P45 Revision A3 northbridge, Intel ICH10R Southbridge
FSB Support: Supports processors with 400/533/800/1066/1333/1600MHz FSB
Crossfire Support: Yes ( x16 - x8 electrical )
Expansion Slot : 2x PCI Express X16, 3x PCI Express x1, 2x PCI
Connectivity
1x Parallel ATA port supporting 2 IDE Drives
8x Serial ATA ports
2x e.SATA port (PCI bracket, will use internal sata ports)
2x Gigabit Ethernet Ports
Expansion Ports
1x PS2 Keyboard Port
1x PS2 Mouse Port
12x USB 2.0 Ports (6 on backplate, 6 by motherboard headers)
6x Stereo Audio Ports
1x RCA SPDIF Port
1x Toslink SPDIF Port
2x RJ45 Ethernet Ports
2x Firewire ports
Now let’s take a look at the package.
[BREAK=Package & Bundle]
The Box
As usual its typical Gigabyte design we are used to. White green box colour scheme.
The back of the box advertises all the UD3 features
Opening the box reveals the contents
The Bundle includes Manual, installation guide book, a driver and application software CD, motherboard I/O shield, Sata cables, IDE cables, eSATA cable and external SATA power connector cable.
[BREAK=The Motherboard]
The motherboard.
At first glance, the motherboard has plenty of stickers on it advertising the motherboard features.
The motherboard follows similar colour scheme to that of other EP45 and X48 Gigabyte boards.
The motherboard design is very simple and traditional ATX 300x240mm. It’s a clean design and nothing much has changed from its previous P45 or X48 boards
The northbridge and PWM mosfets are covered with heatsinks which are interconnected with the heatpipe.
You can see the 6 phase power supply for the CPU. The CPU socket area is clean and has no tall capacitors nearby. Installing most big CPU coolers won’t be an issue, but 1 popular cooler Sunbeamtech Core Contact Freezer won’t fit this boat thanks to the clip design of that cooler.
This is the Gigabyte 6 Phase LED systems. Same thing can be observed all recently released Gigabyte boards.
The RAM slot location is perfect. Its long way away from the CPU socket so even installing tall ramsink sticks won’t be an issue. The RAM module locks can be opened and again locked in without need of removing the graphics card.
[BREAK=The Motherboard Cont.]
The SATA port location is such that even two big cards in crossfire won’t interfere with the cables. No obstructions anywhere.
Now we come to expansion slots. This board does support crossfire and sports two mechanical x16 PCI express slot. But as you must know by now from out previous P45 chipset based reviews, P45 cannot do Dual X16 crossfire. The blue slot is electrically x16 while the red slot is electrically x8.
The location and placement of these slots is very good on this board. Even with two dual slot cooling cards, you will be left with at least 1 of the two PCI slots and 2 PCI express X1 slots that you can use for soundcard or TV tuner.
The board sports dual bios. 1 primary and 1 backup which automatically kicks in in case the primary fails or during the recovery procedure. The bios chips you see here above the USB heder are soldered on to the motherboard.
Here you see the Realtek network chip present on the board. This board features dual gigabit lan via Realtek RTL8111C chips.
Here you can see the clock generator chip.
The backplate of the motherboard sports all the I/O connections mentioned in the specifications.
Overall, there is not much to complain about the board design. Its tried and tested layout and design. Whatever changes UD3 brings are in the PCB layer design with 2 copper layers instead of 1. ( 6 payer PCB with 2 layers of copper )
If there is any complain, it’s that Gigabyte did not provide start and reset buttons like its competitors. That really comes in handy for overclockers and reviewers alike
Let’s move onto the bios.
[BREAK=Bios & Voltage Options]
BIOS and voltage options
The bios on this board is almost identical to other x48 and EP45 series boards from Gigabyte. In fact this board gets all the options in bios that you get on Gigabyte’s flagship EP45-DQ6. This is really good to see on the motherboard which costs hell lot less than flagship models.
I will post the screenshots here as it does not need narrating. All the voltage ranges available are listed at the bottom of this page.
Bios range available to user
Vcore: 0.5 v to 2.3v
Cpu Termination: 1.1v to 1.7v
CPU PLL: 1.050v to 2.81v
CPU Ref: 0.548v to 1.098v
MCH Core: 0.85v to 2.00v
MCH Ref: 0.588v to 1.128v
MCH/DRAM Ref: 0.560v to 1.84v
ICH I/O: 1.000v to 2.31v
ICH Core: 1.1v to 1.4v
DRAM: 1.45v to 3.040v
DRAM Termination: 0.740v to 1.4350v
Channel A/B Ref: 0.560v to 1.84v
All increments are 20mv except ICH Core which has increment of 100mv
[BREAK=Test System]
Test System
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8600
Motherboard: Gigabyte EP45 UD3P, Asus Maximus II Formula
PSU: Tagan BZ1300
RAM: Transcend DDR2 800
Graphics Card: Gigabyte GTX 280
HDD: Seagate 7200.11 SD35 500GB
Optical Drive: Samsung SH S223
Heatsink: Xigmatek HDT S1284 Achilles
Testing on this board was done little differently. The FSB was raised to 440Mhz making the CPU run at 4.4Ghz. At this speed, the CPU and entire system was quiet cool and stable on both the motherboard and it ensured the CPU bottleneck is taken out of picture.
Each benchmark was executed 3 times and average of the three results was taken to ensure consistency of the results.
Windows Vista Ultimate X64 was fully patched and updated and latest drivers for all components were used.
Let’s now move onto the benchmarking.
[BREAK=SuperPi Mod 1.5]
SuperPi Mod 1.5
A very popular benchmark used these days. No special explanation needed for this. Directly to the results.
As you can see, here the EP45 UD3P is slower than Maximus II formula slightly. This is purely number crunching benchmark though .
[BREAK=Cinebench R10 x64]
Cinebench 10 x64
Cinebench over years has become a standard for CPU subsystem benchmarking. The latest Cinebench R10 X64 uses Cinema4D to test the processor.
Here are the numbers.
As you can see its neck and neck and any difference is within the margin of error.
[BREAK=HDTach]
HDTach 3.0.4
HD Tach is the hard drive benchmarking utility. It can measure the CPU usage while using the HDD, Burst speed and average read speed of the hard drive.
Lets have a look.
This board clocked impressive 92.4MB/s Average Read speed and 257MB/s Burst speed as it should be on this 7200.11 SD35 firmware drive. This was against 91.1MB/s and 242MB/s for the same HDD on Maximus II Formula.
[BREAK=Everest Ultimate Edition Memory Performance]
Everest Ultimate Edition Memory Performance
Everest Ultimate is ultimate benchmarking, system information and hardware monitoring suit. Very popular with overclockers and it provides wide variety of benchmarks and hardware monitoring options.
We will be using this to test the memory performance on the boards. Keep in mind that memory is just running at 880Mhz here. We were limited to this speed at the RAM which is usually used for the reviews decided to die on us just when this board was under testing and made us switch to transcend value ram. Results will be updated when the new high speed RAM comes in within next few days.
Again here Results are almost identical.
Let’s move onto the gaming benchmarks.
[BREAK=Crysis]
Crysis.
Oh yes, the ever so debated game out there. Many people call it badly coded game, many curse it for being just a technological demonstration. But surely, no review will can ignore or eliminate this game from their gaming tests
As this is the motherboard review, the game settings were left at High and game was benched at multiple resolutions starting from 800x600 and we went right up to 1920x1080.
So let’s have a look.
There is nothing to choose at relevant and popular gaming resolutions. At 800x600 resolution it’s slightly slower than Maximus, but it matches it at higher resolutions.
[BREAK=World In Conflict]
World In Conflict
World in conflict is one of the best strategy games out there. The graphics and gameplay both are absolutely stunning, and its one of the games that is really CPU and GPU intensive.
We used game’s in build benchmark system. For this test, the graphics setting were set to very high in the game. This enables DX10 render path and also enables 4x AA.
Both the boards were dead even in this benchmark at all resolutions I cared to bench them at. Nothing to choose between these.
[BREAK=Far Cry 2]
Far Cry 2
This is the new game here for the first time in our reviews. This game is based on brand new Dunia Engine made right here in India. Not often we get to say that
This game is somewhat of a mixed bag, entertaining at times but not meant for everyone as those who don’t like long drives in the game that are just that, driving for long time from location A to B and nothing more. Some people hate it, some love it. But we cant ignore it at the moment
The game is not really too heavy on GFX cards. We set everything to V.High and ran the benchmark tool built into the game.
As you can see the Maximus II formula is slightly faster.
Let's move onto synthetic 3D benchmarks.
[BREAK=3DMark 2006]
3DMark 2006
3DMark 2006 is quiet old and I dropped this from my benchmark suit in recent reviews. But I decided to bring it back as it does prove to be good CPU and GPU benchmark even today.
As you can see in the results, they pretty much same on both the boards.
[BREAK=3DMark Vantage]
3DMark Vantage
This is the latest 3d benchmark from FutureMark. Its first DX10 benchmark. A set of synthetic CPU and GPU tests to evaluate system performance. Though its synthetic in nature, its good benchmark for relative comparison.
Again here you can clearly see there is nothing to between these two.
[BREAK=Overclocking & EasyTune 6]
Overclocking and EasyTune 6
This is where the fun begins with this board. I did manage to play with Quad Core CPU on this board before I sat down for this review and within minutes I was benching 3D at 470Mhz FSB with Q9550.
It was almost effortless clocking the 45nm Quad on this board. With C2Q and C2D, the Load line calibration worked beautifully and there was absolutely zero vdroop.
The board did not take too much an effort to even reach 500Mhz FSB on Q9550. There are very few boards that could achieve this. The Maximus II formula did achieve it, but it took me hours and hours of trial and error to get there on that board.
The bios is very simple on this board. And with minimal efforts you can achieve great things on this board which is pretty much evident from the results if you see on the web. Running E8600 at 4.4Ghz 24x7 was piece of cake for this board as there is nothing really special or even impressive about it. This is bread and butter for this motherboard. The memory fiasco has prevented me from actually showing you the real overclocking potential of this board. But expect to see those results here within next couple of days.
Now coming to something really amazing. A piece of software that for the first time brings something better than simple frequency / FSB adjustment to windows.
uGuru was something that everyone wished existed on other motherboards. And now something better has finally come.
EasyTune 6 is amazing piece of software for benchers who hate to reboot the PC everytime to apply new overclocking settings. It allowed you absolutely complete control over frequencies as well as complete range of voltages within the windows. And yes, it even works properly on Windows Vista x64. And it works as it should. It is perfectly stable and does the job perfectly. Here are few screenshots of the same.
Lets move onto the voltage testing
[BREAK=Voltage Testing & Temperatures]
Voltage testing and temperature.
I firmly believe in giving a credit to others where it’s deserved. And I will admit that all the reference points needed to do testing were found and documented by someone else. This great work was done by “MACMAC†from Xtremesystems forum, Futuremark Staff member and reviewer at hardwarecanucks.
Here is the quick look at the actual and set voltages on this board
vCore Readings
vNorthBridge Readings
vPLL Readings
vDIMM Readings
The board does not feature temperature sensors for NB, SB and PWM which is little disappointing. So to take these temperatures, I have to rely on good old digital thermometer. Keep in mind that these temperatures won’t be 100% accurate.
To take these temperatures, I ran orthos stress test and took the readings after 45mins. Room temperature at the time was rather high at around 28°C
As you can see, the northbridge did get warm, but not hot enough to be alarming. That’s it folks, let’s move onto conclusion.
[BREAK=Conclusion]
Conclusion
Well it’s that time again, to sum up the things. And this motherboard does not disappoint. It performs well, it runs nice and cool, and it’s decently loaded with the features.
The real potential of the Intel’s P45 chipset is displayed here. And you got to hand it to Gigabyte for coming out with mainstream motherboard like this o ne.
Gigabyte targeted this board at sub $150 segment internationally and this board is at the moment unchallenged king in this segment. It’s actually worth a lot more than what it costs.
I can’t really find anything to criticize this motherboard. Absolutely nothing. But then, I do have something to complain about this as Indian buyer.
I agree it’s worth more than $140 for which it sells in USA. It is available at similar low pricing in Europe and other countries in Asia. I don’t expect this board to be dirt cheap in India, not at all. But the indicative Retail Pricing given to me is Rs.15,000. I really hope this is just MRP and actual street price is cheaper than this. There is no reason why Indian buyer should be made to pay more than twice the International buyer even after considering the duties and dealer margins.
I know gigabyte will be reading this, and I hope they take this seriously. Most of their products are priced like this here in India. This is mainstream board, and should be priced like that and not like high end motherboard.
Other than this, I have no complains about the hardware. Its a perfect motherboard for Core 2 platform.
Performance: 8/10
Features: 8/10
Overclocking: 9/10
Value For Money: Will be decided when I confirm the street price of this here in India.
Thanks to Gigabyte for providing the sample for the testing. This motherboard should be available in the local market shortly.
Please leave the comments and suggestions here.
Digg this thread at : Digg - Gigabyte EP45-UD3P Review
Shripad signing out for now.
I am back with another exciting product for you guys. Today I take a look at Gigabyte’s latest offering for Core 2 platform, the Gigabyte EP45 UD3P motherboard.
This motherboard is based on Gigabyte’s Ultra Durable 3 PCB design based on Intel’s P45 chipset to replace Ultra Durable 2 design it has been using for a while now. The P45 chipset itself is not that new, and there are plenty of boards already out based on this chipset including Gigabyte’s own EP45 series boards.
So why did Gigabyte launch this board now nearing the end of the Core 2 era? Or is there any point to bring this board out now at all? Let’s find out.
[BREAK=Ultra Durable 3]
The Ultra Durable 3
Gigabyte has been saying a lot about its UD3 design. And it’s equally interesting as well. So what is this all about?
The Ultra Durable 3 design incorporates 4 key components
1. 2oz Copper inner layer
2. 50,000 hours all solid Japanese capacitors
3. Lower rds(on) Mosfet design
4. Ferrite Core chokes
[BREAK=Ultra Durable 3 In Detail]
Ultra Durable 3 In Detail
Let’s take close look at the benefits of these components
2oz Copper Inner Layer
• 50°C cooler than traditional 1oz motherboards
• Enhanced Durability
• Improved energy efficiency
• Better overclocking
• Lower impedance ( upto 2 times lower )
Japanese Solid Capacitors
• Better durability
• Longer life
Lower RDS(on) Mosfet
• Lower resistance
• Lower power consumption
• Lower heat
Ferrite Core Choke
• Better efficiency
• Low energy loss
That’s that. Let’s quickly go through the motherboard Specifications.
[BREAK=Specifications]
Specifications
CPU Support : Intel Core 2, Pentium D, Pentium 4 5xx and 6xx, Celeron D 3xx and 4xx, Pentium DC
Memory Support: 4x Dual Channel DDR2 Slots Supporting DDR2 1366+
Chipset: Intel P45 Revision A3 northbridge, Intel ICH10R Southbridge
FSB Support: Supports processors with 400/533/800/1066/1333/1600MHz FSB
Crossfire Support: Yes ( x16 - x8 electrical )
Expansion Slot : 2x PCI Express X16, 3x PCI Express x1, 2x PCI
Connectivity
1x Parallel ATA port supporting 2 IDE Drives
8x Serial ATA ports
2x e.SATA port (PCI bracket, will use internal sata ports)
2x Gigabit Ethernet Ports
Expansion Ports
1x PS2 Keyboard Port
1x PS2 Mouse Port
12x USB 2.0 Ports (6 on backplate, 6 by motherboard headers)
6x Stereo Audio Ports
1x RCA SPDIF Port
1x Toslink SPDIF Port
2x RJ45 Ethernet Ports
2x Firewire ports
Now let’s take a look at the package.
[BREAK=Package & Bundle]
The Box
As usual its typical Gigabyte design we are used to. White green box colour scheme.
The back of the box advertises all the UD3 features
Opening the box reveals the contents
The Bundle includes Manual, installation guide book, a driver and application software CD, motherboard I/O shield, Sata cables, IDE cables, eSATA cable and external SATA power connector cable.
[BREAK=The Motherboard]
The motherboard.
At first glance, the motherboard has plenty of stickers on it advertising the motherboard features.
The motherboard follows similar colour scheme to that of other EP45 and X48 Gigabyte boards.
The motherboard design is very simple and traditional ATX 300x240mm. It’s a clean design and nothing much has changed from its previous P45 or X48 boards
The northbridge and PWM mosfets are covered with heatsinks which are interconnected with the heatpipe.
You can see the 6 phase power supply for the CPU. The CPU socket area is clean and has no tall capacitors nearby. Installing most big CPU coolers won’t be an issue, but 1 popular cooler Sunbeamtech Core Contact Freezer won’t fit this boat thanks to the clip design of that cooler.
This is the Gigabyte 6 Phase LED systems. Same thing can be observed all recently released Gigabyte boards.
The RAM slot location is perfect. Its long way away from the CPU socket so even installing tall ramsink sticks won’t be an issue. The RAM module locks can be opened and again locked in without need of removing the graphics card.
[BREAK=The Motherboard Cont.]
The SATA port location is such that even two big cards in crossfire won’t interfere with the cables. No obstructions anywhere.
Now we come to expansion slots. This board does support crossfire and sports two mechanical x16 PCI express slot. But as you must know by now from out previous P45 chipset based reviews, P45 cannot do Dual X16 crossfire. The blue slot is electrically x16 while the red slot is electrically x8.
The location and placement of these slots is very good on this board. Even with two dual slot cooling cards, you will be left with at least 1 of the two PCI slots and 2 PCI express X1 slots that you can use for soundcard or TV tuner.
The board sports dual bios. 1 primary and 1 backup which automatically kicks in in case the primary fails or during the recovery procedure. The bios chips you see here above the USB heder are soldered on to the motherboard.
Here you see the Realtek network chip present on the board. This board features dual gigabit lan via Realtek RTL8111C chips.
Here you can see the clock generator chip.
The backplate of the motherboard sports all the I/O connections mentioned in the specifications.
Overall, there is not much to complain about the board design. Its tried and tested layout and design. Whatever changes UD3 brings are in the PCB layer design with 2 copper layers instead of 1. ( 6 payer PCB with 2 layers of copper )
If there is any complain, it’s that Gigabyte did not provide start and reset buttons like its competitors. That really comes in handy for overclockers and reviewers alike
Let’s move onto the bios.
[BREAK=Bios & Voltage Options]
BIOS and voltage options
The bios on this board is almost identical to other x48 and EP45 series boards from Gigabyte. In fact this board gets all the options in bios that you get on Gigabyte’s flagship EP45-DQ6. This is really good to see on the motherboard which costs hell lot less than flagship models.
I will post the screenshots here as it does not need narrating. All the voltage ranges available are listed at the bottom of this page.
Bios range available to user
Vcore: 0.5 v to 2.3v
Cpu Termination: 1.1v to 1.7v
CPU PLL: 1.050v to 2.81v
CPU Ref: 0.548v to 1.098v
MCH Core: 0.85v to 2.00v
MCH Ref: 0.588v to 1.128v
MCH/DRAM Ref: 0.560v to 1.84v
ICH I/O: 1.000v to 2.31v
ICH Core: 1.1v to 1.4v
DRAM: 1.45v to 3.040v
DRAM Termination: 0.740v to 1.4350v
Channel A/B Ref: 0.560v to 1.84v
All increments are 20mv except ICH Core which has increment of 100mv
[BREAK=Test System]
Test System
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8600
Motherboard: Gigabyte EP45 UD3P, Asus Maximus II Formula
PSU: Tagan BZ1300
RAM: Transcend DDR2 800
Graphics Card: Gigabyte GTX 280
HDD: Seagate 7200.11 SD35 500GB
Optical Drive: Samsung SH S223
Heatsink: Xigmatek HDT S1284 Achilles
Testing on this board was done little differently. The FSB was raised to 440Mhz making the CPU run at 4.4Ghz. At this speed, the CPU and entire system was quiet cool and stable on both the motherboard and it ensured the CPU bottleneck is taken out of picture.
Each benchmark was executed 3 times and average of the three results was taken to ensure consistency of the results.
Windows Vista Ultimate X64 was fully patched and updated and latest drivers for all components were used.
Let’s now move onto the benchmarking.
[BREAK=SuperPi Mod 1.5]
SuperPi Mod 1.5
A very popular benchmark used these days. No special explanation needed for this. Directly to the results.
As you can see, here the EP45 UD3P is slower than Maximus II formula slightly. This is purely number crunching benchmark though .
[BREAK=Cinebench R10 x64]
Cinebench 10 x64
Cinebench over years has become a standard for CPU subsystem benchmarking. The latest Cinebench R10 X64 uses Cinema4D to test the processor.
Here are the numbers.
As you can see its neck and neck and any difference is within the margin of error.
[BREAK=HDTach]
HDTach 3.0.4
HD Tach is the hard drive benchmarking utility. It can measure the CPU usage while using the HDD, Burst speed and average read speed of the hard drive.
Lets have a look.
This board clocked impressive 92.4MB/s Average Read speed and 257MB/s Burst speed as it should be on this 7200.11 SD35 firmware drive. This was against 91.1MB/s and 242MB/s for the same HDD on Maximus II Formula.
[BREAK=Everest Ultimate Edition Memory Performance]
Everest Ultimate Edition Memory Performance
Everest Ultimate is ultimate benchmarking, system information and hardware monitoring suit. Very popular with overclockers and it provides wide variety of benchmarks and hardware monitoring options.
We will be using this to test the memory performance on the boards. Keep in mind that memory is just running at 880Mhz here. We were limited to this speed at the RAM which is usually used for the reviews decided to die on us just when this board was under testing and made us switch to transcend value ram. Results will be updated when the new high speed RAM comes in within next few days.
Again here Results are almost identical.
Let’s move onto the gaming benchmarks.
[BREAK=Crysis]
Crysis.
Oh yes, the ever so debated game out there. Many people call it badly coded game, many curse it for being just a technological demonstration. But surely, no review will can ignore or eliminate this game from their gaming tests
As this is the motherboard review, the game settings were left at High and game was benched at multiple resolutions starting from 800x600 and we went right up to 1920x1080.
So let’s have a look.
There is nothing to choose at relevant and popular gaming resolutions. At 800x600 resolution it’s slightly slower than Maximus, but it matches it at higher resolutions.
[BREAK=World In Conflict]
World In Conflict
World in conflict is one of the best strategy games out there. The graphics and gameplay both are absolutely stunning, and its one of the games that is really CPU and GPU intensive.
We used game’s in build benchmark system. For this test, the graphics setting were set to very high in the game. This enables DX10 render path and also enables 4x AA.
Both the boards were dead even in this benchmark at all resolutions I cared to bench them at. Nothing to choose between these.
[BREAK=Far Cry 2]
Far Cry 2
This is the new game here for the first time in our reviews. This game is based on brand new Dunia Engine made right here in India. Not often we get to say that
This game is somewhat of a mixed bag, entertaining at times but not meant for everyone as those who don’t like long drives in the game that are just that, driving for long time from location A to B and nothing more. Some people hate it, some love it. But we cant ignore it at the moment
The game is not really too heavy on GFX cards. We set everything to V.High and ran the benchmark tool built into the game.
As you can see the Maximus II formula is slightly faster.
Let's move onto synthetic 3D benchmarks.
[BREAK=3DMark 2006]
3DMark 2006
3DMark 2006 is quiet old and I dropped this from my benchmark suit in recent reviews. But I decided to bring it back as it does prove to be good CPU and GPU benchmark even today.
As you can see in the results, they pretty much same on both the boards.
[BREAK=3DMark Vantage]
3DMark Vantage
This is the latest 3d benchmark from FutureMark. Its first DX10 benchmark. A set of synthetic CPU and GPU tests to evaluate system performance. Though its synthetic in nature, its good benchmark for relative comparison.
Again here you can clearly see there is nothing to between these two.
[BREAK=Overclocking & EasyTune 6]
Overclocking and EasyTune 6
This is where the fun begins with this board. I did manage to play with Quad Core CPU on this board before I sat down for this review and within minutes I was benching 3D at 470Mhz FSB with Q9550.
It was almost effortless clocking the 45nm Quad on this board. With C2Q and C2D, the Load line calibration worked beautifully and there was absolutely zero vdroop.
The board did not take too much an effort to even reach 500Mhz FSB on Q9550. There are very few boards that could achieve this. The Maximus II formula did achieve it, but it took me hours and hours of trial and error to get there on that board.
The bios is very simple on this board. And with minimal efforts you can achieve great things on this board which is pretty much evident from the results if you see on the web. Running E8600 at 4.4Ghz 24x7 was piece of cake for this board as there is nothing really special or even impressive about it. This is bread and butter for this motherboard. The memory fiasco has prevented me from actually showing you the real overclocking potential of this board. But expect to see those results here within next couple of days.
Now coming to something really amazing. A piece of software that for the first time brings something better than simple frequency / FSB adjustment to windows.
uGuru was something that everyone wished existed on other motherboards. And now something better has finally come.
EasyTune 6 is amazing piece of software for benchers who hate to reboot the PC everytime to apply new overclocking settings. It allowed you absolutely complete control over frequencies as well as complete range of voltages within the windows. And yes, it even works properly on Windows Vista x64. And it works as it should. It is perfectly stable and does the job perfectly. Here are few screenshots of the same.
Lets move onto the voltage testing
[BREAK=Voltage Testing & Temperatures]
Voltage testing and temperature.
I firmly believe in giving a credit to others where it’s deserved. And I will admit that all the reference points needed to do testing were found and documented by someone else. This great work was done by “MACMAC†from Xtremesystems forum, Futuremark Staff member and reviewer at hardwarecanucks.
Here is the quick look at the actual and set voltages on this board
vCore Readings
vNorthBridge Readings
vPLL Readings
vDIMM Readings
The board does not feature temperature sensors for NB, SB and PWM which is little disappointing. So to take these temperatures, I have to rely on good old digital thermometer. Keep in mind that these temperatures won’t be 100% accurate.
To take these temperatures, I ran orthos stress test and took the readings after 45mins. Room temperature at the time was rather high at around 28°C
As you can see, the northbridge did get warm, but not hot enough to be alarming. That’s it folks, let’s move onto conclusion.
[BREAK=Conclusion]
Conclusion
Well it’s that time again, to sum up the things. And this motherboard does not disappoint. It performs well, it runs nice and cool, and it’s decently loaded with the features.
The real potential of the Intel’s P45 chipset is displayed here. And you got to hand it to Gigabyte for coming out with mainstream motherboard like this o ne.
Gigabyte targeted this board at sub $150 segment internationally and this board is at the moment unchallenged king in this segment. It’s actually worth a lot more than what it costs.
I can’t really find anything to criticize this motherboard. Absolutely nothing. But then, I do have something to complain about this as Indian buyer.
I agree it’s worth more than $140 for which it sells in USA. It is available at similar low pricing in Europe and other countries in Asia. I don’t expect this board to be dirt cheap in India, not at all. But the indicative Retail Pricing given to me is Rs.15,000. I really hope this is just MRP and actual street price is cheaper than this. There is no reason why Indian buyer should be made to pay more than twice the International buyer even after considering the duties and dealer margins.
I know gigabyte will be reading this, and I hope they take this seriously. Most of their products are priced like this here in India. This is mainstream board, and should be priced like that and not like high end motherboard.
Other than this, I have no complains about the hardware. Its a perfect motherboard for Core 2 platform.
Performance: 8/10
Features: 8/10
Overclocking: 9/10
Value For Money: Will be decided when I confirm the street price of this here in India.
Thanks to Gigabyte for providing the sample for the testing. This motherboard should be available in the local market shortly.
Please leave the comments and suggestions here.
Digg this thread at : Digg - Gigabyte EP45-UD3P Review
Shripad signing out for now.
and very good board as well with a proper layout. 
