Gigabyte Z87X-UD5H LGA 1150 Motherboard Review @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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Gigabyte Z87X-UD5H LGA 1150 Motherboard Review - Gigabyte brings a lot to the test bench with the Z87X-UD5H. New UEFI, New Easy Tune software, and a whole lot more. Gigabyte is facing some very tough competition based on what we’ve seen from other manufacturers. Does Gigabyte still have what it takes to compete? Let’s find out.
 
Great review!

It's a shame about the poor BIOS mouse support (It does the same thing on G1.Sniper5 and it's really bad. Even more infuriating is the fact that some adjustments send you to the "old" 3D BIOS where mouse support is excellent). Hopefully they will improve this with newer release.
 
I would really like to see this motherboard's BIOS get refined quickly. It seems as though it has been a bit rushed but has great potential to be a very solid product.
 
Poor Gigabyte. They try so hard to be like Asus and can never quite pull it off. They would actually be my go-to motherboard if it wasn't for stuff like this.
 
I wouldn't hold your breath on bios updates... supposedly my P67A-UD4 was going to get a UEFI bios update after release.... never happened.
 
ChefJoe said:
I wouldn't hold your breath on bios updates... supposedly my P67A-UD4 was going to get a UEFI bios update after release.... never happened.
Click to expand...

No P67 boards that I can recall ever got such an update. I also don't recall Gigabyte or any other brand officially mentioning doing an update like that. In many cases it wouldn't have been possible due to the ROM's used anyway. Gigabyte is pretty good though about regular BIOS updates on their boards so I'm fairly certain most of these issues will be addressed satisfactorily at some point. Though how long that will take is anyone's guess.

What I don't want to see is this board still running with horrid UEFI mouse support 6 months from now while newer Z87 boards get the problem smoothed out. (Literally.) I tend to review these boards and kind of forget about them and move onto the next one. So I don't know if Gigabyte retroactively fixes that type of issue or not. What I do know is that Gigabyte will most likely resolve the issues with booting from DVD-ROM and F12 screen capture lockups. etc. Smoothing out the mouse is something that may or may not get a lot of attention.
 
Dan_D said:
No P67 boards that I can recall ever got such an update. I also don't recall Gigabyte or any other brand officially mentioning doing an update like that. In many cases it wouldn't have been possible due to the ROM's used anyway. Gigabyte is pretty good though about regular BIOS updates on their boards so I'm fairly certain most of these issues will be addressed satisfactorily at some point. Though how long that will take is anyone's guess.
Click to expand...

You're right.... it wasn't official, although I do recall some leaked test versions (or maybe they were modded z68 bioses. They didn't seem to correct some review sites that suggested their weakness relative to the competition might disappear with future updates.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4130/the-battle-of-the-p67-boards-asus-vs-gigabyte-at-190/5
Gigabyte’s dual BIOS system is on this board. Yes, that is right – BIOS. No UEFI here. Well, that's not strictly true, as one of the latest BIOS updates at the time of writing (F6) implements an EFI into the BIOS, reportedly allowing bootable access to hard drives over 2.2TB. This is due to, as Gigabyte explained, that their board is actually UEFI, but without a proper GUI interface like other boards. They've used the old BIOS-style interface for now, as after years of plugging away they believe it's quick, stable and recognisable for consumers to understand. So underneath, it's truly 64-bit, meaning 2.2TB+ partition support is possible, and could also suggest that a new GUI is coming in the future. I asked about time-scale for this, but Gigabyte were undoubtedly tight-lipped about dates and implementations.

http://www.nordichardware.com/Motherboards/gigabyte-p67a-ud7-in-detailed-preview.html
Support for UEFI in future updates
Gigabyte isn't ready with its UEFI BIOS before the launch of Sandy Bridge. This will certainly hold it back when competing with ASUS. The company has made the most of what it has though. First of all it has supplied Gigabyte P67A-UD7 with dual BIOS circuits and they are upgradeable to UEFI. When the UEFI update comes we don't know.
 
Hi all and thnx for reviewing this board. Not meaning to offend anyone but Gigabyte has ALWAYS been the 'nearly, nearly' mobo maker since I started building PCs, mid 90s. Their boards have always been functional and can be relied on to POST....most times.
Kyle, just wondering if the older dimms not working is something you have run into before? Seems most of the Giga boards I work with have issues, or maybe it's just a learning curve other board makers have saved us from..I like the look of the OC boards though, hope they deliver on their potential..thank-you again Dan and Kyle for all your work..gl with everything!!!
 
How can you get those ridiculous sata speeds on the Marvell controller? Unless i misread a WD Caviar black hdd was used in testing. It's just not possible. 500mb/s is high even for burst speed for hdds.

More likely Marvell uses driver cache mode, i have an older 9128/9130 controller and it has a check box for cache in device manager.
 
mircx said:
How can you get those ridiculous sata speeds on the Marvell controller? Unless i misread a WD Caviar black hdd was used in testing. It's just not possible. 500mb/s is high even for burst speed for hdds.

More likely Marvell uses driver cache mode, i have an older 9128/9130 controller and it has a check box for cache in device manager.
Click to expand...

Initially I thought it was the application itself. I've seen the same results out of HD Tach and ATTO. What I believe is going on here is a combination of drive caching and burst speeds which cause the numbers to show up as they do. And yes, these are Caviar Black drives which are being used for these tests. I think IOMeter gave us better results but it's never acted right since transitioning to SATA 6Gb/s testing. Also the drive preparation it does also takes a considerable amount of time and such testing is slow going.
 
Did you guys or anyone else that may have this board have any issues launching Easy Tune 6? I get a 'Loading, please wait...' translucent prompt that never goes away when attempting to launch it from both App Center or by itself from Program Files.
 
skadebo said:
Did you guys or anyone else that may have this board have any issues launching Easy Tune 6? I get a 'Loading, please wait...' translucent prompt that never goes away when attempting to launch it from both App Center or by itself from Program Files.
Click to expand...

I didn't have any issues like that at all. Actually this was the best experience I've had with any Gigabyte board from a software standpoint.
 
Dan_D said:
What I don't want to see is this board still running with horrid UEFI mouse support 6 months from now while newer Z87 boards get the problem smoothed out. (Literally.) I tend to review these boards and kind of forget about them and move onto the next one. So I don't know if Gigabyte retroactively fixes that type of issue or not. What I do know is that Gigabyte will most likely resolve the issues with booting from DVD-ROM and F12 screen capture lockups. etc. Smoothing out the mouse is something that may or may not get a lot of attention.
Click to expand...

Well, in an effort to figure out my RAID speed problems I installed the latest F6f beta bios on my UD3H and there is mouse speed options in the UEFI now. The mouse moves MUCH smoother in the HD screens. It's still a bit too sensitive and choppy in the classic mode, but HD was definitely corrected already.

And to note: New BIOS gave about a 25% increase in seq read/write, but I'm still about 50MB/sec low on write and 150MB down on read if I can believe crystaldisk. Starting to wonder if I have something else I'm missing...
 
Jeremy C said:
Well, in an effort to figure out my RAID speed problems I installed the latest F6f beta bios on my UD3H and there is mouse speed options in the UEFI now. The mouse moves MUCH smoother in the HD screens. It's still a bit too sensitive and choppy in the classic mode, but HD was definitely corrected already.

And to note: New BIOS gave about a 25% increase in seq read/write, but I'm still about 50MB/sec low on write and 150MB down on read if I can believe crystaldisk. Starting to wonder if I have something else I'm missing...
Click to expand...

Frankly a lot of the HDD testing applications show considerable variance from one board to the next. I have a suspicion that these applications are doing this because of burst speeds on the drives. As long as I can remember doing this sort of thing Western Digital drives have always produced odd ball results based on how they handle caching. Even in the Norton for DOS days these kind of readings happened.

I think the main thing to take away from disk benchmarks in motherboard reviews is whether or not the drive controller is working properly. I'd only be concerned with results on the extreme low end of the spectrum. And naturally any descriptions of problems encountered in that part of the review should be of particular interest to people. (Just my opinion.)
 
Dan_D said:
I didn't have any issues like that at all. Actually this was the best experience I've had with any Gigabyte board from a software standpoint.
Click to expand...

Just an update on this. At the time of writing that post I was using the release F5 bios and the latest available EasyTune software, the combination of which was resulting in Easytune not being able to launch. Updating the the beta bios, F6j fixed the easytune launch issue.

Anyway, I was having a few other problems like the full HD uefi bios not being displayed with my 560ti or 680 however this was also fixed today with the release F5 bios. The mouse is also very smooth, no problem there anymore.
 
Hi,

You guys described this board as a 12 phase board but elsewhere they say its a 16 phase board??

thanks
 
The review on the first page describes the UD5H as having a 12+2 power phase. That must be an error.
 
Everyone's correct: here's a snippet from hardwarecanucks:
More precisely, it has been outfitted with an 12+2+2 phase power design for the CPU, so 12 phases dedicated to the cores themselves, two for the System Agent (SA), and two phases for the integrated GPU
Click to expand...
 
Very nice board but I have an odd issue that you might have noticed during your review.
If you attach any HDD to the Marvell controller the HDD light stays on solid, least it does with me.
I've tried different drives, same result. Removing the drive to the Intel controller removes the issue.
This board has the latest Marvell controller and I am using the latest driver.
Another strange issue I had is I took a older Samsung F3 with files on it from my older XP computer and W7-64 hung for quite awhile then crashed saying it could not fully load and to do recovery. I restarted and checked bios, the drive was not being seen.
Same drive shows up fine on the Marvell controller but is now flagged failed due to the spin-up being below threshold, this is false, the drive works great.
Either the Z87 does not like Samsung, does not like files already on the drive or something else.
Using a blank WD black drive, no issues. I was leery to put files on it to test it only to have it get flagged too.
Using the latest Intel RST driver, bios is set for raid but not in raid, just raid ready. Raid includes AHCI so that is not the issue.
Did you or has anybody else notice these odd behaviors?
Thanks
 
ep0x73 said:
Very nice board but I have an odd issue that you might have noticed during your review.
If you attach any HDD to the Marvell controller the HDD light stays on solid, least it does with me.
I've tried different drives, same result. Removing the drive to the Intel controller removes the issue.
This board has the latest Marvell controller and I am using the latest driver.
Another strange issue I had is I took a older Samsung F3 with files on it from my older XP computer and W7-64 hung for quite awhile then crashed saying it could not fully load and to do recovery. I restarted and checked bios, the drive was not being seen.
Same drive shows up fine on the Marvell controller but is now flagged failed due to the spin-up being below threshold, this is false, the drive works great.
Either the Z87 does not like Samsung, does not like files already on the drive or something else.
Using a blank WD black drive, no issues. I was leery to put files on it to test it only to have it get flagged too.
Using the latest Intel RST driver, bios is set for raid but not in raid, just raid ready. Raid includes AHCI so that is not the issue.
Did you or has anybody else notice these odd behaviors?
Thanks
Click to expand...

I sent GBT a note on this, maybe its team will reach out.
 
Thanks, they know you well by now.

I did contact Gigabyte myself about this issue. They always have responded fairly quickly to help but they really had no clue about what could be causing it.

I even went as far as to uninstall the RST drivers back to windows default and use just ACHI through the gigabyte ezsetup, same results.

I know the drive is good but this board or the Z87 chipset just flat out refuses to acknowledge the drive in bios. :mad:

The F3 is not new but not that old either. First time I ever had a known good drive refuse to show up on any board.

1TB drive, one partition in NTFS. I can put it in two older core2duo systems with no issue.
 
Hi ep0x73,
With regard to your problem on HDD LED always light.]
--> I think you should send your motherboard to RMA for an marvel firmware update.
While your problem on Samsung F3, what is your firmware version.
I have checked some website regarding some firmware update for Samsung F3 hard disk.
Maybe you may check with Seagate if this is also application to your case.
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/223631en?language=en_US
 
Wonder if the Gigabyte bios is readable by MMtool and if so possible to update the Marvel firmware ourselves if there exists a newer firmware on another boards bios we can rip?
 
I just ordered one of these boards and a 4770k for a friend. Should arrive around Friday to complete the build. going to mess around with a bit and see how it compares to the the Asus boards. Then I can make my decision on which one to go with then. Thanks for the review and information on the board in here on it.

I will ask this to Kyle and Dan_D. Which bios do you like better of the two Asus or Gigabyte. and what was the reasons for liking or disliking them? Thanks
 
ep0x73 said:
Very nice board but I have an odd issue that you might have noticed during your review.
If you attach any HDD to the Marvell controller the HDD light stays on solid, least it does with me.
I've tried different drives, same result. Removing the drive to the Intel controller removes the issue.
This board has the latest Marvell controller and I am using the latest driver.
Another strange issue I had is I took a older Samsung F3 with files on it from my older XP computer and W7-64 hung for quite awhile then crashed saying it could not fully load and to do recovery. I restarted and checked bios, the drive was not being seen.
Same drive shows up fine on the Marvell controller but is now flagged failed due to the spin-up being below threshold, this is false, the drive works great.
Either the Z87 does not like Samsung, does not like files already on the drive or something else.
Using a blank WD black drive, no issues. I was leery to put files on it to test it only to have it get flagged too.
Using the latest Intel RST driver, bios is set for raid but not in raid, just raid ready. Raid includes AHCI so that is not the issue.
Did you or has anybody else notice these odd behaviors?
Thanks
Click to expand...

Hello Kyle,

Can you please provide me with this customers email? Or can you please help to find these information from the users? Thank you.

Motherboard?
BIOS version?

Also, our engineer have found that user is also experiencing a problem with Samsung F3 that is not being detected on Intel port.
But Marvel port work OK.
1. Can you help check the Samsung hard disk model and spec?
2. Can you check with user if he has done the firmware patch?
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/223631en?language=en_US


Will you PM me and I will give you the address you can reach out to GBT with. Thanks.
 
KILLER_K said:
I just ordered one of these boards and a 4770k for a friend. Should arrive around Friday to complete the build. going to mess around with a bit and see how it compares to the the Asus boards. Then I can make my decision on which one to go with then. Thanks for the review and information on the board in here on it.

I will ask this to Kyle and Dan_D. Which bios do you like better of the two Asus or Gigabyte. and what was the reasons for liking or disliking them? Thanks
Click to expand...

I prefer the ASUS UEFI by quite a bit. Mouse responsiveness is worlds ahead of the GIGABYTE boards and the ASUS one is easier to use. The GIGABYTE board tends to duplicate settings in multiple areas and the way it flows could use some improvement. The GIGABYTE also wastes time by making you dive deeper into submenus than you should. The "classic" BIOS interface it offers isn't all that great either. ASUS' UEFI is easier to use than that is and again works more responsively. Mouse support in the classic interface is usually worse than it is in the newer style interface. The look of the GIGABYTE UEFI is good and there are some good ideas there but it needs streamlining.

Now that doesn't mean the GIGABYTE UEFI is bad by any means, but I feel that the ASUS offering is stronger as they didn't try to reinvent the wheel with it and kept it as functional and easy to work with as BIOS, but adding much needed utility to it as it evolves. GIGABYTE's is certainly prettier for sure, but that's not something that I care too much about. Intel's is really pretty too but seems alien the first time you get into it.
 
I forgot the F3's had a firmware update, since this drive has been happy on a P35 chipset and it's only a backup drive I never bothered with it.
Generally to be on the safe side all files should be moved before you flash a drive, right now I have nowhere to put them.

As for the Marvell controller, I can add this info to determine if a newer firmware exists.

Firmware : 2.3.0.1050
Boot loader : 2.1.0.1005
Driver : 1.2.0.1035
Chip revision : A0

Motheboard is the Z87X-UD5H
Bios F7
 
Thank you Dan_D, this was just the information that I was wanting to hear.
 
Can we get an answer from Gigabyte for this issue? it looks like it effects all(?) Gigabyte motherboards. Anyone else running 4 sticks of ram on this board?
 
I have tried 4 sticks of RAM on more than one GIGABYTE motherboard with success. I'm sure that doesn't apply to all GIGABYTE motherboards. Perhaps a significant number of them but I've not heard of this issue before.
 
techie81 said:
Can we get an answer from Gigabyte for this issue? it looks like it effects all(?) Gigabyte motherboards. Anyone else running 4 sticks of ram on this board?
Click to expand...



I had problems with 2 sticks of ram on my Z87X-OC only half the kit was showing up. I reset the sticks and pushed them down in the the sockets and rebooted and all the memory showed up. Problem appeared to be that the ram was not making good contact in the memory slot. All good now.
 
Dan_D said:
I have tried 4 sticks of RAM on more than one GIGABYTE motherboard with success. I'm sure that doesn't apply to all GIGABYTE motherboards. Perhaps a significant number of them but I've not heard of this issue before.
Click to expand...

Hey Dan, sorry to dig this up but has GBT addressed some of the BIOS issues that were mentioned in the article? Would that change your opinions?
 
TheWeazmeister said:
Hey Dan, sorry to dig this up but has GBT addressed some of the BIOS issues that were mentioned in the article? Would that change your opinions?
Click to expand...

If they have, I hadn't heard of it specifically. Once in awhile we revisit a board if there is enough merit / changes in doing so. Basically something which would change the conclusion of the article were we to retest it. Often times manufacturers let us know if there is something ground breaking which would make us re-evaluate our thinking.

Again this hasn't happened yet to the best of my knowledge. If some of these issues have been addressed, then great. It would change my final conclusion on the board for certain. But as of right now I'd recommend other things ahead of this one based on my existing experiences with it.
 
Just seen a review at newegg where somebody has the same problem I have so it's not just me.
Could be more common and not known until you try the Marvell controller.

"Cons: HDD LED problems on both boards. If any HDD or ODD is connected to the GSATA ports the HDD LED is always on."

Gigabyte responded by saying make sure it has the latest F7, well he's going to be disappointed because I flashed to F7 and it did nothing nor using the latest Marvell driver which just came out.
 
Guys,

If your having issues try the new f8 beta. It's on Station-Drivers somewhere. I was having ram stability issues this beta driver may have fixed. Also if this bios is readable by mmtool I'll try to mod it over the weekend with latest intel and marvel firmwares. Good thing the board has dual bios though just in case!

Good luck!
 
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Sounds great, but I am curious why it shows up there before Gigabyte's own website? Least it seems they are working on it.
I still say it's a bios issue with the Gsata ROM which is doing this and not hardware based which is why I do not want to sent my board in.
It's working great, no issues and I don't want to take the chance and induce other issues not present.
If you can hack into the beta bios to see if anything related to marvell is included that might suggest they are aware of the issue.
 
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ep0x73 said:
Sounds great, but I am curious why it shows up there before Gigabyte's own website? Least it seems they are working on it.
I still say it's a bios issue with the Gsata ROM which is doing this and not hardware based which is why I do not want to sent my board in.
It's working great, no issues and I don't want to take the chance and induce other issues not present.
If you can hack into the beta bios to see if anything related to marvell is included that might suggest they are aware of the issue.
Click to expand...

Hi,

I pulled the Marvell firmware from the bios of the UD5H and found that its version 1.0.0.0027 where as the latest one I could find is version 1.0.0.1033. Not sure why GB is using an older version. Maybe has to do with licensing. Anyhow as I do not use the Marvell controller I'm not compelled to update the bios to the latest Marvell firmware version but if anyone wants it just ask.

Not sure if it will solve those mysterious hd led light issues I haven't encountered yet.
 
I have 1.2.0.1039 for the marvell driver, that is the latest I've seen so far for W7.
As for the firmware I'd have to check, whatever was in F7.
Possible when F8 is final they will update to 1.0.0.1033 or better.
 
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