GA-X79-UD3 - Mainstream and Overclocking

Gigabyte says that the UD3 has been developed as an overclocking and mainstream motherboard. Therefore you find a total of four PCI-Express slots on the PCB. The first and the third slot are x16 ports, the second and the fourth have been labled with x8. In fact this x79 entry level board offer quad SLI or CrossFireX support with up to four graphics cards. Sure, a setup like this will block the connectors at the bottom edge of the board.
According to the pictures we see that Gigabyte equipped the UD3 with a 16 phase power design. If this is correct we will know when Gigabyte releases the official specifications.



It seems like Gigabyte had enough from their eingine block design chipset cooler. Theses days the do simple but good looking passive cooling elements.
On the UD3 you find a total of four DIMM slots which means that just one Quad-Channel-Kit can be put in place. If you use 8 Gigabyte modules there'll certainly be enough memory but upgradeability is slightly compromised. Nevertheless thanks to the fact that this board "only" comes with four DIMM slots Gigabyte has been able to keep it in an ATX formfactor, which means that it fits in every single ATX case out there.
A closer look at the I/O panel lets us guess that Gigabyte equipped this board with a total of eight USB3.0 ports. Furthermore there are two USB2.0 connectors, two eSATA ports, a gigabit ethernet connector an analogue audio panel as well as an optical an coaxial audio out. Even a PS2 mouse/keyboard connector can be found. Regarding the audio chip we can only see that it comes from Realtek but we do not know which model it actually is .



Regarding SATA port one can find a total of ten on the UD3. Eight of which have been angled by 90 degrees. Two are straight and they are located at the bottom edge of the board.
Looking for fan headers shows that there are four on the UD3. Two are above the CPU socket slightly to the left another is on the right edge of the board and a last can be found at the bottom edge.
Placing a dual slot graphics card in the last PCI-Express x16 slot will mean that the connectors at the bottom edge of the board will be blocked. But on the other hand, with four PCI-Express x16 slots at hand this might be a very unlikely scenario.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 4 - GA-X79-UD7 - Enthusiast and Overclocking
Page 2 - GA-X79-UD3 - Mainstream and Overclocking	Page 5 - G1.Assassin - Gaming
Page 3 - GA-X79-UD5 - Content Creation	Page 6 - Conclusion

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