GA-X58A ud3r ud5 ud7 which one

[dean1]

I have been looking at reviews everywhere and most benchmarks all 3 boards are real close so what is the real big difference?

currently have:

GA-EX58-UD4P F14M Bios
i7 920 o\c 3.5ghz water cooled. to but want to go up to i950
Corsair cm3x2g16008d 12Gigs
2 4870x2 water cooled o/c gpu's at 900 memory at 1ghz temps at 40c max.

just got 2 1tb sata 3 drives and also want usb3.0 so new board is in order but can't decide! ud3r to ud5 $70 then ud3r to ud7 $140

Thanks

[sin0822]

Re: GA-X58A ud3r ud5 ud7 which one

Well right now the UD7 and UD5 are shipping rev 2.0, if you take a very close look, they have made them almost identical, the only real difference is the watercooled NB, get the UD5 and call it a day, i take my 930 to 4.5ghz with it. The new ud5 and ud7 both have the same powerphases, same hardware and everything. The only step up would be the UD9, but if you are only going to take your cputo 3.5 or 4ghz just get he UD3R rev 2.0 its nice as well.

[wazza300]

Re: GA-X58A ud3r ud5 ud7 which one

your better off sticking to your current mb imo,sata3 is fine but the drivers are poor and wont be as reliable as the intel sata2 ports,
a cheaper more reliable option is to add in a sata3 pci-e card like this and run your hdd's off that

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CC-004-SR

[sin0822]

Re: GA-X58A ud3r ud5 ud7 which one

Actually thats not 100% correct, take a look at the brand new beta bios's and their continuing marvell firmware update is great, fixes a TON of issues and boosts speeds. Also you don't use marvell drivers, windows 7 will automatically install AHCI.

Start here and take alook at the first page, and continuing pages to learn: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...=259402&page=4

[dean1]

Re: GA-X58A ud3r ud5 ud7 which one

wazza 300 would love to keep current board. but with wireless lan card and sound card along with 2 4870x2 cards i have no more room for add on cards. the only thing i have seen so far is that the ud7 comes with NB water block that sits on top of cooling fins. i see allot of people with memory issues and boot problems with the ud3r. not so much with the ud5 and hardly any with the ud7. makes me wonder if its the board or the price point.(more inexperienced people buy cheeper board?)

Anybody with some thoughts want 10 sata slots no room for add on cards

Thanks

[sin0822]

Re: GA-X58A ud3r ud5 ud7 which one

Id get the UD5 and i have tons of experience, there is just no point for me to buy a UD7. The more expensive boards allow for 3 and 4 way true 16x sli, i had no need for that, so i got the best board gigabyte could offer instead of the UD9, and i wasn't going to pay to add a cheap NB block that sits on stupid fins to my loop./

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-X58A ud3r ud5 ud7 which one

Actually thats not 100% correct, take a look at the brand new beta bios's and their continuing marvell firmware update is great, fixes a TON of issues and boosts speeds. Also you don't use marvell drivers, windows 7 will automatically install AHCI.

Start here and take alook at the first page, and continuing pages to learn: ***Unofficial GA-X58A-UD5/UD7* rev 2.0* Discussion Thread - Page 4 - XtremeSystems Forums

I've tested the new Marvell firmware, no real changes in performance or lack of, the only real thing the updated BIOS fixes is correcting the issue presented in the last round of finals where you could not set/enter the RAID BIOS.

UD7 is really UD5 now, for Rev. 2.0, so I'd go with UD5 unless you can find a Rev. 1.0 UD7 (Then if so grab it quick!)

Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 Rev 2 Motherboard Review | Reviews - Clunk.org.uk

[sin0822]

Re: GA-X58A ud3r ud5 ud7 which one

have you see this: Google Translate Stasio linked it. I think there is an improvement with marvell drivers as a result of this update.

[sin0822]

Re: GA-X58A ud3r ud5 ud7 which one

Mods please ban him^^^^^^

[Psycho101]

Re: GA-X58A ud3r ud5 ud7 which one

I'd say get the UD5 too if you really must upgrade.

Just a few things though...

You say you want to get an i7 950. Any reason why? Seems pretty pointless when you're not even making the most of your 920. With water you could easily be running north of 4GHz. "upgrading" to a 950 is zero upgrade. Depending on stepping, you'll get virtually identical clocks and therefore performance from your 920. Running quadfire, 3.5GHZ is almost definitely bottlenecking your GPU's at some point. Probably at very high res and with tons of AA, but 3.5GHz is a bottleneck none the less.

Unless your SSD is SATA 3 then you're also going to be severely disappointed. The difference between SATA2 and SATA3 for spinning drives is minimal and definitely won't be noticable. I speak from experience. Only burst rate will improve, that's all. Sequential read, write and most importantly small random transfers will be at exactly the same speed. Synthetic benches may improve microscopically but real world doesn't. With mainstream HDD's struggling to top 170MB/s for in-line sequential read, ie barely over the SATA 1 standard, SATA2 is over kill, let alone SATA3. For SATA 3 SSD's, it's another story. The jump is very noticable with a high capacity drive (>200MB) and the upgrade would be worth it then.

In my opinion, buy the UD5, forget the i7 950 and use some of the money that would have been wasted to grab a 200+GB sandforce drive. You can then grab a USB 3 enclosure and mount your current SSD in it as a very fast external.

I'm only suggesting this to try and maximise the performance boost you'll see. I assume it's performance you want, because if it were just storage you needed, SATA 3 wouldn't be, as you have expressed, a priority.

Feel free to ignore any/all of this, I just think you can get a decidedly large performance boost this way rather than the 1% at best from hooking up two spinning SATA 3 drives and exchanging a CPU that still has 500-700MHz left to give and won't overclock any less than a 950, no matter how cheap the 950's are ATM.

[sin0822]

Re: GA-X58A ud3r ud5 ud7 which one

You have an sata3 ssd? b/c sandforce drives atm dont use sata3

[Psycho101]

Re: GA-X58A ud3r ud5 ud7 which one

No, typo, I meant Micron, not Sandforce. And no, I never mentioned owning a SATA 3 SSD in my post.

Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB Sata 3 SSD ? reghardware

[sin0822]

Re: GA-X58A ud3r ud5 ud7 which one

i was just curios you know a lot about it i was just asking.

[Psycho101]

Re: GA-X58A ud3r ud5 ud7 which one

One was on the list but I proiritized SLI over it. That's one of the reasons I'm not too keen on SATA 3 atm. Until it goes mainstream, IE Intel put it on the ICH, just like AMD have already integrated it on their SB, we'll continue to get restrictions on lower end platforms on how it can be used, unfortunately.

Looking around though, Sandforce drives may or may not perform slightly better on some of the more accurate implementations of SATA 3. The results using an External Rocket RAID SATA3 card for example improve the scores of Sandforce drives by a small amount. Could be due to the card being an add in or maybe even because the card can supply more close to the SATA2 max of 300MB/s (theoretical max). 265MB of the Crucial Real SSD in SATA2 mode is definitely pushing the boundaries of the spec a bit.

[sin0822]

Re: GA-X58A ud3r ud5 ud7 which one

Intel has integrated sata3 on server chipset used on the SR-2, but they dont use it they use marvell instead?