Gigabyte X79-UD3: The Best Value X79 Board

Value
The Gigabyte X79-UD3 motherboard is not cheap, it currently retails for $239.99 on Newegg. But when considering that the cheaper X79 boards are ASRock and Biostar, one begins to understand that this board is the only non-reference board that is guaranteed to be well built with a good layout and at a pretty affordable price. We highly recommend the UD3 over the cheapest option, the $209.99 Intel board, which is a poorly designed board in comparison with worse performance.

Even though this board did not come with all of the accessories that the X79-UD7 included, we do not really consider them to be a major difference when taking into account that the wireless module is not even a dual-band module. The UD3 includes all necessary accessories and not much else due to it being a no-frills X79 board.

Conclusion
After the UD3 through its paces for a few months, there is no doubt that this board is a great budget X79 board that can handle anything and punches above its own class. Based on the performance we have seen on this board, we do not understand why anyone would buy anything more expensive from Gigabyte's X79 line. At this price point, there is no doubt that going X79 is expensive, but it delivers the memory bandwidth and performance that power users simply demand. Also, to this day, the X79 platform is still the fastest around and is likely to keep that designation for at least the rest of 2012.

Based on our previous testing of X79 boards, the price of this board, the features, and the outcome of our testing results, we can happily award the X79 UD3 our Value Workstation award for being the best value for an X79 board.