Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H Motherboard Review @ [H]

Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H Motherboard Review - The Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H represents a more budget oriented offering within Gigabyte’s lineup. "Budget" doesn’t necessarily mean bad, and "expensive" doesn’t necessarily mean good when it comes to motherboards. The question is, "How does Gigabyte’s Z77X-UD3H stack up against so many great budget boards already out there?"

I have this motherboard and ran into the issues described with having to play with the USB headers to find one that would work the first time while installing... I should have paid attention and caught the bit about VIA being used on this board *shudders* Also, update your bios... I had issues running an Xeon in this board that was fixed after I updated the bios. It has had a few quirks but otherwise it has been solid and stable... I would recommend disabling the VIA ports altogether and putting in an add in board. Thanks for the review Kyle... glad I am not the only one that ran into oddities with this board.

My experience with Gigabyte has been mixed.

I have two HTPCs running on their boards, good experience there. Things "just worked." Although the lack of Intel NICs is a bummer.

I tried and returned a high end board because it basically blew. Stuck with Asus on that build.

And what is up with PCI slots? Just omit it and save a few pennies. Or put an PCIe 1x slot in there.

I have a user review of this board posted in the motherboard section as well. I think my review matches up well with the [H] review, although i did not experience any failures to recover from an overclock.

I think the board offers exceptional value for the price.

Not a bad show for the price range, Gigabyte. Onwards and upwards.

I have this board and absolutely LOVE it! That said, there were a few weird issues with the early BIOS revisions.

Also, a few notes regarding the review:

UEFI

The worst part was this aspect of the UEFI was extremely slow. Gigabyte went too far with animations and it came out looking pretty crappy. I wish there was a way to disable that and use the more traditional advanced look.

Click to expand...

Once I went into the advanced view, entered all of my settings and saved them, I've never once booted back into the GUI. ...the only time you see it again is when you do a BIOS update.

Atheros NIC

The small files download test showed us surprisingly good results. We saw an average transfer rate of 84.0MB/s and a maximum of 94.6MB/s. While not a speed record, few cards, even the Intel’s are so consistent. CPU usage was a bit on the high side at 5%.

Click to expand...

If you go into Device Manager -> Network Adapters and right click on Properties of the Atheros AR8151 NIC, check out the Advanced Settings. You can tweak these and it'll provide lower CPU utilization. Just to name some to play around with: Flow Control, Interrupt Moderation, Checksum Offland, Large Send Offload, Buffer size, Receive Side Scaling, etc. It took a while to get my settings "just right" (and learn wtf all the settings did).

Given the hype on the forums about getting an Intel NIC, I was worried about getting this board with Atheros. Anyways, it performed better than the Marvell NIC on my Asus P6T!

Is it just me or am I the only one tired of hearing more and more Intel boards coming out?

I have the Z68 version, my first gigabyte board. Overall, impressed for the $$$. One thing I noticed is Gigabyte is good about updating drivers, bios, and related firmware. Looking like this will be one of the go-to budget o/c boards in a few months once firmware matures.

PynkFloydd said:

If you go into Device Manager -> Network Adapters and right click on Properties of the Atheros AR8151 NIC, check out the Advanced Settings. You can tweak these and it'll provide lower CPU utilization. Just to name some to play around with: Flow Control, Interrupt Moderation, Checksum Offland, Large Send Offload, Buffer size, Receive Side Scaling, etc. It took a while to get my settings "just right" (and learn wtf all the settings did).

Click to expand...

Could you write up your findings and explanations somewhere?

PynkFloydd said:

I have this board and absolutely LOVE it! That said, there were a few weird issues with the early BIOS revisions.

Also, a few notes regarding the review:

UEFI



Once I went into the advanced view, entered all of my settings and saved them, I've never once booted back into the GUI. ...the only time you see it again is when you do a BIOS update.

Atheros NIC



If you go into Device Manager -> Network Adapters and right click on Properties of the Atheros AR8151 NIC, check out the Advanced Settings. You can tweak these and it'll provide lower CPU utilization. Just to name some to play around with: Flow Control, Interrupt Moderation, Checksum Offland, Large Send Offload, Buffer size, Receive Side Scaling, etc. It took a while to get my settings "just right" (and learn wtf all the settings did).

Given the hype on the forums about getting an Intel NIC, I was worried about getting this board with Atheros. Anyways, it performed better than the Marvell NIC on my Asus P6T!

Click to expand...

I can do a lot with the Intel NIC software settings too. The same is true of Broadcom and others. However they differ from model to model of NIC and from brand to brand. I don't mess with any of that so we have a clear and precise testing methodology for all boards which allows for comparisons of their onboard features.

Great Tiger said:

Is it just me or am I the only one tired of hearing more and more Intel boards coming out?

Click to expand...

Given the performance of Bulldozer, I doubt as many people are as interested in AM3+ boards as they are in LGA1155 and even LGA2011 boards.

BTW the $145 board at Amazon is a D3H, not UD3H. Not sure what the difference is, but the UD3H reviewed here is about $160 at most retailers

Great Tiger said:

Is it just me or am I the only one tired of hearing more and more Intel boards coming out?

Click to expand...

Its just you.

Meeho said:

Could you write up your findings and explanations somewhere?

Click to expand...

Of course, no problem! Sorry it took a bit to get back to you. I just got accepted to Columbia University and have been hit with a million and two things to do.


The "ideal" settings for your network setup can greatly differ from mine, depending on what you've got connected to your home network, your ISP and your needs. For reference, I've got a Negear WNDR4000 router, Western Digital Live NAS, Epson Artisan networked printer (usually I leave off unless needed since it lacks a gigabit NIC) and tons of wireless toys connected on the N 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. I also use a VPN at times. ...this is worth mentioned because the ideal MTU can vary a little slightly from your ISP. For reference, I've found Comcast (my ISP) listed 1500 as ideal.

To find my ideal settings, I testing by observing the impact on file transfer across my network, pings, latency testing and of course...good ol' Speedtest. Play around a bit, test and worst case scenario...just uninstall the NIC driver, reboot and reinstall and you should be back at default.

I'm also NOT using the Atheros drivers listed (2.0.4.4) on Gigabyte's site as they're from 2011. If you go to the Qualcomm/Atheros site, you can grab the 2.0.14.15 driver:

http://www.qca.qualcomm.com/corporate/content.php?nav1=146

Also, for an explanation of the different settings, here's a good resource:

http://www.broadcom.com/support/ethernet_nic/faq_drivers.php


Flow Control - I've found that this can affect your thoroughput. If you're running a full gigabit network, there's no reason to have this enabled and it'll hurt more than help. Do a web search for "Flow Control" and you'll see that there are tons of reports of it slowing performance.

Interrupt Moderation - The best explanation I've found was this one and presented the case to disable it:

"Most network cards from popular manufacturers such as Intel, Broadcom, Realtek, etc. hold network packets in a buffer until enough time goes by before raising a hardware interrupt and telling the processor, operating system, and network driver that there are packets waiting to be serviced. By disabling Interrupt Moderation you instruct the network driver and card to raise the interrupt every single time a packet comes in, thus making your processor service the network card much faster thus decreasing latency on the packets held in the buffer and also increasing bandwidth by allowing more packets to flow through faster. This increases your processor utilization by a significant amount 10-30% but if you have a recent dual, quad, hex, octo-core processor and recent network drivers that are multi-threaded with multi-core support and have Receive Side Scaling support then the increased processor utilization is negligible to your computer and if you are running a network server then network performance should be a priority anyway.

I have personally seen and tested corporate and home LAN environments using Fast Ethernet 100 Mbit/s (~11 MByte/s) go from slow 6-7 MByte/s to 10-11 MByte/s throughput, and Gigabit 1,000 Mbit/s (~100 MByte/s) go from ~30 MByte/s to 95-98 MByte/s speeds due to these changes. No other network driver setting had as much performance impact as Interrupt Moderation."


http://www.guildportal.com/Guild.aspx?GuildID=338165&TabID=2830792&ForumID=1599785&TopicID=9057382

xxxxx Offload - According to the articles on Microsoft's MSDN site, most of the these are used to transfer the workload from the CPU to the network adapter.

Receive Side Scaling: Again, according to MSDN: "Receive-side scaling (RSS) is a network driver technology that enables the efficient distribution of network receive processing across multiple CPUs in multiprocessor systems. Note Because hyper-threaded CPUs on the same core processor share the same execution engine, the effect is not the same as having multiple core processors. For this reason, RSS does not use hyper-threaded processors."

Dan_D said:

I can do a lot with the Intel NIC software settings too. The same is true of Broadcom and others. However they differ from model to model of NIC and from brand to brand. I don't mess with any of that so we have a clear and precise testing methodology for all boards which allows for comparisons of their onboard features.

Click to expand...

Dan, thanks for responding! ...totally understand where you're coming from and as always, it was a GREAT review from the [H]!

For the most part, the default settings aren't bad at all and I'm sure that most users will be happy without even touching them. I just wanted to mention CPU utilization specifically since there are tons of settings that can increase/decrease this and the default settings aren't exactly ideal...but "compatible" with most network setups.

I tried searching for reviews of the NIC performance prior to buying this since I had no experience with Atheros's NICs and couldn't find any mention of it. ...plus everyone keeps hyping up Intel's NICs and how they're the gold standard. I almost didn't buy this board because of it! ...so, I just wanted to point out that it's solid and definitely tweakable if someone looks at the review and isn't happy with the CPU utilization.

Thanks for the summary and congrats on the acceptance.

Don't remember seeing it in the article, but I just tried the @BIOS utility for the first time since installing the board several weeks ago. The board I bought in May had F7 revision, while F9 is now the latest. Haven't been able to find revision notes to see what was fixed.

I'm always sketchy when it comes to in-OS BIOS flashing, but figured that since there was a backup BIOS as well, wouldn't hurt to try. Went flawlessly, but afterwards I started to wonder: When exactly does the backup BIOS get updated? Does it ever actually get updated? Maybe after a successful boot?

No info on fan headers and controls?

Meeho said:

Thanks for the summary and congrats on the acceptance.

Click to expand...

No problem! I didn't include specific settings recommendations since every network setup is different. ...but the info should help you decide what's best for you.

Thank you! I'm just glad it wasn't another "we regret to inform you" letter!

Polarhound said:

The board I bought in May had F7 revision, while F9 is now the latest. Haven't been able to find revision notes to see what was fixed.

I'm always sketchy when it comes to in-OS BIOS flashing, but figured that since there was a backup BIOS as well, wouldn't hurt to try. Went flawlessly, but afterwards I started to wonder: When exactly does the backup BIOS get updated? Does it ever actually get updated? Maybe after a successful boot?

Click to expand...

F11 is actually the latest BIOS. If you go to Gigabyte's site and click on the "Downloads" tab of the UD3H, you'll find a drop down menu with a BIOS option. From there, you'll be able to get all of the latest and see some short notes.

http://www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4153&dl=1#bios

According to the site:
"F9 - Improve system compatibility
F10 - Improve SE9172 SATA3 6Gb/s compatibility
F11 - Improve CPU stability"

I remember the F11 beta BIOS revisions just said it added support for additional processors, so I'd assume that's also in the final F11.

The BIOS download is a compressed file that extracts when you click the .exe. I've just been putting it on a USB flash drive and flashing it from the BIOS (through Q-Flash).

F11 has been really stable for me and I haven't noticed any quirks.

I would guess you have to switch to the backup bios and update it the same way.

Great review.
Bought this board because of it for a friend's build.
I had no issues with it whatsoever.

I was going to google +1 this, but the actual +1 icon seems to be replaced with unclickable text that just reads Google +1.

Anyone else having wake from sleep issues?

Thanks for doing such a rigorous review HF.

I've been looking at the z77 UD5 - I hope it doesn't have the same quirks? I've never had Gigabyte before so, I'm nervous. Is Gigabyte as good as the rest i.e. MSI, Asus or not?

I've got a thread here hoping for a review of Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH - it's suppose to be out any time.

No wake from sleep issues with mine at all. Bios F11.

I would rate Gigabyte above MSI and equal to Asus. They have been trying really hard to get the enthusiast market.

Thanks Kirbsster! I downloaded F11 from the website, updated and it's gone... Strange that the auto updater gigabyte gives you doesn't update beyond F9d.

Yeah, sometimes it takes a while for the auto updater to update...

Guys is there any merit to this guys claims or is he just talking shit? I haven't read any of these vid card issues in the review or this thread.


"Do not get this motherboard if you get a new generation Video Card the only way gtx 670s worked on this motherboard if i scaled from from GEN3 Pci express to GEN1 this is a not a future proof board and there had not been any bios updates to address this issue. "

I had no issues with a gtx680 in mine.

kirbster said:

No wake from sleep issues with mine at all. Bios F11.

I would rate Gigabyte above MSI and equal to Asus. They have been trying really hard to get the enthusiast market.

Click to expand...

F11 also fixes the mouse issues in the UEFI BIOS

I had lots of issues with mine and am not sure if I'll keep it or RMA it for exchange or another board.
It's odd that some people have lots of issues while others have according to them, none. But every system is different and some people have more simple demands.

My system is fairly simple, additionally all I have are 2 usb 3 hard drives, 2 hubs, 1 rumblepad (logitech), a magicjack, my printer and a Logitech G930 headset. I also use a Logitech G19 Keyboard.

Here were my quirks:

1. VIA ports are finicky and will randomly not work. A reboot generally fixes it.

2. Intel ports tend to not work pre-boot (so it's hard to get into BIOS)..oddly, they do work inside the BIOS since you can see drives attached to them and use whatever is attached to them.

3.* My G19 KB and G930 Headset don't play well with the board's ports.

4. Sandforce based SSDs will likely freeze on wake up (many manuf. recommend you don't sleep them, anyway).

5. If you have CPU power saving enabled (EIST, C1E) you're asking for a BSOD, eventually. It may not be now, it may not be next week, but it will be because of power saving (since without it, all is well).

6. If you don't lock your BCLK to 100.1 at stock, you may have issues. This may have been fixed since one of the newer BIOSes but I haven't taken the chance, I lock mine. I am on the latest beta bios 12j which seems so far to be solid.

* The issue with the keyboard is that it doesn't get detected early on boot while on the Intel port so it JUST misses being able to get into the BIOS. There are times it does come on right away. It works every time on the VIA port, but 1 in about 10 times I've booted to the OS and the VIA ports just seem to be completely dead...so no keyboard to even shut down properly unless I physically unplug it and then put it into the Intel ports. USB musical chairs is no fun.
The issue with the headset is most annoying, but seems to have been alleviated by putting it on the USB 2 bracket. The VIA onboard audio seems to drop for some reason at every boot. It is very brief, but it happens (you can hear the device disconnect noise and physically see it disappear and come back) and within this time the default audio gets set to the next best thing which for me is the G930. This means I have to manually set it back to the VIA on every reboot/boot which gets old fast. I don't know if it would happen with other USB soundcards but I suspect it will. Likewise, it doesn't happen if I unplug the G930, but I don't since it's what I use for Skype and my Magicjack.

I had no issues with the initial install, since I did pay attention to the manual. But I had a hard time with all these issues until I got a USB 2 bracket and put my hubs with usb 2 devices on them. Now things seem like they might be ok for the long term - no way to know until I wait it out.

Gigabyte support seems to be non-existent in some cases since I wrote them about 5 days ago and have still not gotten a response. They're pretty quick to find you on Newegg though.