Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R

Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R

Manufacturer: Gigabyte
UK Price (as reviewed): £97.94 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): $119.99 (ex. Tax)

Looking back through our reviews I was surprised to realise just how many Gigabyte boards have passed through our test benches - P45 alone we're up to three now, as Gigabyte continues to expand its range, or in this case, reinvent itself. For those familiar with Gigabyte boards, you have spotted the new acronym: UD3R. This board is related to the DS3R we looked at in the past, but it features a visual facelift and Gigabyte's latest Ultra Durable technology with 2oz of copper, instead of just one, as a grounding layer in the PCB.

Gigabyte has also challenged UD3 owners to beat the global DDR2 overclocking gurus - claiming an insane 1,508MHz. Clearly, Gigabyte's BIOS engineers have been working overtime and this board costs under £100! Who needs £300 Core i7 boards to have some fun? We certainly don't!

Is it just marketing fluff though? We had high hopes for the DS3R but were ultimately a bit let down by its multi-GPU and overclocking performance, even though the rest of it still worked well and we scored a solid eight overall. The question is, can the UD3R iron out the kinks and stretch out an awesome nine or incredible ten?

Box Contents

Four SATA cables with two 90 degree connectors,
• One SATA to eSATA cable,
  
• One Molex to two eSATA power cables
  
• One eSATA PCI bracket
  
• IDE and floppy cables
  
• Metal rear I/O shield
  
• Driver disc and maunals

Despite missing four of the total eight SATA ports there are a mix of SATA cables and all the stuff needed to make normal hard drives into eSATA ones, which makes another good Gigabyte package of extras. There's no eSATA-eSATA cable disappointingly, but the manual is comprehensive and the auto driver installation feature on the disc is still excellent in its ease of use.