Gigabyte GA-X99-UD4P Review

Performance Analysis

At stock speed we noticed that a number of results were a little low, but no matter what we did in the EFI, we couldn't iron them out. Most notably, the Photo Editing score was a second longer than the previous slowest result. You'll also want to avoid 2,133MHz memory as this prevents the CPU from boosting all the way to it's stock limit of 3.5GHz. Apart from this the stock speed result was above average.

The storage tests didn't reveal any issues and the 758MB/sec read speed using out M.2 SSD is the fastest we've seen, while the GA-X99-UD4P didn't have any issues pushing our SATA 6Gbps Samsung 850 Pro to its limits. The audio performance was good, if not spectacular, with very similar results to the X99M-Gaming 5 and noticeably better than either the MSI X99S MPower or X99S SLI Plus.


With our joint highest overclock, we expected some lofty results, but sadly this didn't turn out to be the case. There was still some sort of issue with the Photo Editing test, with the GA-X99-UD4P only a little faster than some of the stock speed results. A number of other boards were faster in the video encoding test despite having 100MHz disadvantages in clock speed and it was the same for the game tests and rendering benchmarks too.

This can be explained partly by the lower power consumption - we'd expect a load result of over 450W, especially with one of the highest overclocks we've seen, but the GA-X99-UD4P came in at just 422W. We'd disabled all the power saving features, increased the power limits and tried numerous other things but were unable to shake these odd results. Thankfully, the disadvantage here is small in reality.

Conclusion

Apart from some inconsistencies in the results and slightly disappointing results from a very high overclock, the GA-X99-UD4P is an otherwise excellent motherboard. It has good onboard audio and storage results and is well-placed for multi-GPU setups too. In a decision between it and the MSI X99S MPower, though, we'd still lean towards the latter for air-cooled single graphics card systems; it has the full array of onboard overclocking tools and a better EFI. However, as the latter doesn't have its x16 speed PCI-E slots double-spaced, if you're looking at a dual-GPU air-cooled system, the GA-X99-UD4P is the better choice and comes recommended - just.