Gigabyte X79-UD3: The Best Value X79 Board

Overclocking
When it came to overclocking the X79-UD3 we were unsure what to expect since the X79-UD7 was a mediocre overclocker that was being touted as an overclocking board. Since the UD3 is being billed as an entry-level X79 board, we had our doubts as to how well it would do.

We were able to attain 4.6 GHz maximum stable overclock with this board; the very same overclock that we managed to obtain on our X79-UD7. This is still lower than our X79 reference board which did 4.86 GHz, and we have even seen some boards do 4.9 GHz on water cooling.

Nevertheless, for this board's ‘entry-level’ designation, 4.6 GHz isn't bad at all. The performance scales much like it did on the UD7, except the UD3 costs about half as much as the UD7 and only a little more than the reference X79 board.

Power Consumption and Heat
We compared power consumption and heat on the UD3 vs the UD7 and observed that the X79 UD7 runs a bit hotter than the UD3 with the hottest core running at 60 during a stress test and the UD3 only running at 56 on the same test. Similarly, on the UD3, the CPU also drew less power at full load, drawing 101.41w compared to the UD7's 105.32w. Interestingly, this was done with exactly the same voltages on each board, though the UD7 pushed the 3960X a little higher at stock settings.