The BIOS
As does I guess every Gigabyte motherboard I’ve seen, the X58A-UD3R uses the Award BIOS, which is set up with a main menu and submenus for navigation. If you flash the BIOS to the latest one, as I usually do, Gigabyte’s Q-Flash works great for flashing with a thumb drive. Their software flash program, @BIOS flashes the BIOS in the Windows environment and also works well. Regardless of which method you use, after flashing the BIOS you need to go back into the BIOS and “Load Optimized Defaults” before doing anything else, either in the BIOS or in Windows. This redetects all peripherals and may correct some settings that are now wrong. It’s no big deal, and rebooting is not necessary before making adjustments in the BIOS.
I should note that all motherboard manufacturers recommend that unless you are having problems you should probably not flash to the latest BIOS. Out of the dozens of times I have flashed a BIOS I have only had a couple of issues, and they were due to the new BIOS not being totally ready for release. Gigabyte has so many fail-safe measures built into their boards that you nearly can’t screw up.
The X58A-UD3R’s BIOS is very similar to the last Gigabyte X58 board I used, the X58-UD4P. There are probably some small differences, but the primary menu you will use, the M.I.T. (MB Intelligent Tweaker) menu is set up the same way. The Core i7 900 Series/X58 chipset is a little complicated in the overclocking department, and Gigabyte’s BIOS is the best layout for the X58 I’ve seen.
All of the relevant overclocking tweaks are either in the M.I.T. menu or one of the submenus located here. The items chosen for submenus are all to keep the M.I.T. menu less cluttered.
One awesome addition to this board’s BIOS over the earlier board is the “CPU Frequency” display. The older BIOS showed the current clock speed, and did not change as the BCLK or CPU Clock Ratio (multiplier) was changed. The X58A-UD3R’s CPU Frequency display changes as you alter the settings, so no need for calculator or pen and paper. This is always a greatly appreciated feature, and this may be the first Gigabyte board I’ve owned with it.
The Advanced CPU Features menu is a submenu located on the M.I.T. menu. You won’t use it for overclocking, but all of the CPU’s other settings are here, including Turbo Boost, EIST, C1E, and some others. I always recommend disabling Turbo Boost, EIST, and C1E while overclocking or running benchmarks.
The Standard CMOS Features submenu contains Date/Time and drives found by the system.
The Advanced BIOS Features submenu contains all of the boot relevant settings such as hard disk priority and boot device priority. The POST splash screen can also be disabled here.
The Integrated Peripherals submenu enables/disables most onboard devices.
The PC Health submenu shows temps, voltages, fan speeds, and settings for the CPU fan.
How can the board be “laid out well” if the two x16 slots are side by side.
This effectively hamstrings any dual-GPU solution above a Radeon 4850. It's completely illogical.
???
Your overclocking results graphs should either go to zero on the dependent axis or include results from another setup for comparison. Without doing one of the two, the bar graph picture tells us nothing at best, and is misleading at worst.
Sorry to harp, but I just want to help. Your review is very useful and well done otherwise.
The article is incorrect. the 2 x16 slots are slots 3 & 5, for a 3 way SLI, add in slot #7 running at x8. Slot #4 is a spare x8 that generally gets covered by the primary video card.
Do you know if VT-d is working on this mobo? X58 chipset have this feature but sometimes it doesn't work. I'd like buy this mobo and install ESXi 4 (or XEN) with VT-d (VMDirectPath). Anybody test VT-d on this motherboard?
Sorry for my bad english
Do you know if VT-d is working on this mobo? X58 chipset have this feature but sometimes it doesn't work. I'd like buy this mobo and install ESXi 4 (or XEN) with VT-d (VMDirectPath). Anybody test VT-d on this motherboard?
Sorry for my bad english
Yes, I have ESXi 4.0 Update 1 installed on this motherboard. Can't get ESXi to recognize RAID — keeps seeing the individual disks, but ESXi is running great, including a 64-bit VM, so VT-d is working.
Was on-board LAN interface working with ESXi 4.0 ?
I Have this board know and i cant get windows 7 to install! really anoying. please help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Windows 7 installer freezes with the hard disk and optical drive hooked up to the Southbridge-powered SATA ports. Workaround: install Windows 7 with the drives connected to the Gigabyte SATA2 controller. After the successful installation the Southbridge-powered ports work.
Windows 7 installer freezes with the hard disk and optical drive hooked up to the Southbridge-powered SATA ports. Workaround: install Windows 7 with the drives connected to the Gigabyte SATA2 controller. After the successful installation the Southbridge-powered ports work.
Thanks for the info. I was just about to buy one of these boards and I'm sure I would have came across this problem.
VT-d is for directed I/O, a feature of the chipset used to map hardware directly to virtual machine, it's not the same as VT, the CPU feature used to run 64 bit virtual machine.
So, your answers is not correct.
it seems that VT-d is not supported in this board.
See there: http://www.vm-help.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13…
Before you run out and buy one of these, google the MB and the terms “High pitched noise, or “whine”.
This board and it’s next two higher (UD5 & UD7) priced x58 cousins have been having problems with a VERY ANNOYING whine, sort of like a cat fight. Most folks think it’s the chokes. Gigabyte has been releasing bios updates to cure a hardware problem. To date, no cure despite revision 2 releases of the board. Google the board before you buy. There are videos on youtube of the problems.