Gigabyte X79-UD3: The Best Value X79 Board

Performance
We tested the X79-UD3 using a 3960X, but one could just as easily use a 3930K processor and get almost the same results. The 3960X is an expensive processor, and the 3930K is much cheaper and comes very close to the performance of the 3960X and has the same bandwidth without paying over $1000. The 3930K is about $500, which is about half the price of the 3960K, though it is not quite as overclockable. We ran this system with 16GB of 1600MHz RAM and made sure that our test bed was identical to the UD7 and X79 Reference Board from Intel.

Cinebench
When it came to Cinebench, we were surprised to discover that the X79-UD3 actually outperformed the UD7. Admittedly, not by a large margin, but considering that the UD7 is a much more expensive board, there is no doubt that this is astounding.

The UD3 scored 10.43 while the UD7 scored 10.41. This is a tiny performance improvement, but considering they are running the same BIOS revision, it is interesting. We wonder if this trend will continue. Perhaps the UD7's BIOS was too complicated or poorly written.

AIDA64
In AIDA64, we tested the CPU performance between the two systems as well as the CPU's floating performance. We bundled these scores together to showcase how the UD3 performed against the other boards.

Once again, the UD3 slightly edges out the UD7 even though the UD3 is supposed to be the 'mainstream' affordable board. This is great news to everyone except UD7 board owners. We are beginning to see a trend here and it looks promising.

x264 HD
In this benchmark, we are testing the video processing capability of the processor and by extension, the motherboard. We will look to this test to determine how well the UD3 performs against the reference board as well as the UD7.

Looking at these results, it is a bit hard to tell, but the X79 UD7 is actually a slightly faster than the X79-UD3. This has to do with the fact that the UD7 has the best memory performance that we have ever seen on a motherboard; this is probably the board's strongest suit. Since the UD3's memory performance is not as good there is minuscule difference in overall performance between the UD3 and UD7. However, the X79-UD3 is still faster than the Intel reference board which is only slightly cheaper.