Pros: Price, Overclocks, northbridge and power regulator heatsinks, RAID, dual BIOS, works with MacOSX
Cons: None.
The Bottom Line: If you are looking for an inexpensive overclocking motherboard with excellent features, you really can't go wrong with a Gigabyte EP45-UD3R.
nad_masters's Full Review: Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R Motherboard
After owning two revisions of the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L motherboards, I was very impressed with the performance, reliability, and stability of such an inexpensive ($100) board. I was also equally impressed with how high I was able to overclock with such a modest board! In short, it had a 4-pin 12v Aux, 4-phase power regulator, and it was still able to handle my Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 at 3.5 GHz on a 1.425v vCore!
When I decided to upgrade and started to take apart my old rig, I found out that the voltage regulators were causing a brown discoloration on the underside of the board! However, it still runs like a champ! This is because there was too much power draw for the 4-phase power regulators, and the 4-pin Aux connector's ground leads. Also, the power regulators did not have any kind of cooling (no heatsinks). This board takes a beating and keeps going!
After seeing that, I vowed that my next board would have to be a Gigabyte, use a current chipset (P45), AND must have some sort of heatsinks on the voltage regulators! Also, it must have at least 6-phase power regulators, and a 8-pin 12v Aux plug to handle the higher current draw. Because I was running a RAID 0 setup with my WD Raptor drives (a hindsight when I bought a RAID-less P35-DS3L), I wanted to make sure my next board will have an Intel ICH10R controller that can handle RAID setups.
Gigabyte makes it easy - it offers two solutions for me: GA-EP35-UD3R and UD3P. Both have everything I was looking for, except that the "P" have 2 PCI-E x16 slots for a Crossfire (dual ATI video card) setup. Since I don't plan on getting two video cards (I can always buy a single card with dual GPUs), I decided to go with the "R" that is $15 cheaper.
In the Box The box is very basic. Inside, you get a manual, a quick guide, a driver CD, a set of cables (4 SATA, 1 IDE, an eSATA bracket /w 2x eSATA), a Gigabyte sticker, and the motherboard itself.
There's no mistake that Gigabyte is positioning the EP-45-UD3R as a mid-range board by it's packaging.
Specs and Features
CPU Socket Type LGA 775
CPU Type Quad-core / Core 2 Extreme / Core 2 Duo / Pentium Extreme / Pentium D
FSB 1600/1333/1066MHz
Chipset North Bridge - Intel P45 South Bridge - Intel ICH10R
Memory 4 slots of 240pin DDR2 1066 (Dual Channel), 16GB Max
Onboard (Internal connectors, requires headers) 4x USB 2.0 1x IEEE 1394 1x Serial Port 1x Parallel Port
Physical Spec Standard ATX Form Factor Dimensions, 12.0" x 8.3"
Electrical 24 Pin ATX Power Pin, 8-pin 12v AUX All solid aluminium capacitors (will not leak or go bad!)
Installation The board is surprisingly small for such a features set! Even with 8 total SATA ports, legacy COM and LPT ports, and 12 USB 2.0 ports! Not to mention a northbridge chipset and voltage regulator heatsinks with heatpipe, and 4 DDR2 memory slots!
Gigabyte engineers made sure the CPU area is clear of obstruction for large heatsinks that enthusiasts tend to use. Most of us tend to use the tower-type heatsinks, which are designed to clear boards that aren't as considerate anyways, but it's a nice design on Gigabyte's part in case you decide to use a heatsink that sits low.
One of the nice thoughtful touch is that the retention mechanism for the 16x PCIe slot (for the video card) is easier to use than the others. While others require you to push on a latch that is obscured by the video card itself, or have a knob where you pull to one side while lifting the card (hard to do for some, though easier than the first), this motherboard will have you push a latch towards the PCIe slot itself while you pull on the card.
The yellow ICH10R 6x SATA slots are towards the bottom, and the perfect placement if you have short SATA cables. It is out of the way of a long PCI-E graphics card. The purple 2x SATA slots managed by the Gigabyte SATA2 controller is closer to the memory slots, but thankfully still out of the way of large graphics card.
The floppy connector is located near the LPT and COM ports, and the end of the board by the last PCI slot. This can make installing a floppy drive tricky if you don't have a long enough cable. Thankfully, floppy drives are rarely used these days.
The 24-pin ATX power connector, both are closer to the drive cages when installed inside a case. This may not be ideal in some situations since the thick ATX power cable is hard to manage, but in my case, I was able to sneak it from behind the mothebroard tray (Cooler Master HAF 922). In fact, most of my wiring is done behind the motherboard tray. The ATX power connector is located right were the optical drives are in smaller cases, and can cause problems. Again, no issues for a larger case like the HAF 922.
The slot locations are perfect, however. 3 PCI slots occupy the bottom while 2 PCIe x1 slots distance the PCI cards from the PCIe 16x slot (where a video card would reside). Then above the PCIe 16x slot is another PCIe x1 slot. This gives 2 usable PCIe x1 slots if you wish to leave a slot free between the video card and the other cards.
Also, there are a total of 4 power connectors for fans! There's one for the CPU, SYSTEM1, SYSTEM2, and POWER. All of them are monitored by the BIOS, and can be set to sound an alarm when one of the fans malfunction as long as the fan have a speed detection wire (3 wires).
The front HD audio header is a bit hard to get to since it is by the rear, and also very close to the PCI-E x16 slot. Fortunately, it does clear, and in fact, fits snugly underneath a video card that requires two slots. However, the CMOS battery is located just below the PCI-E x1 slot next to the PCI-E x16 slot, which means a dual-slot video card will need to be removed to replace a dead CMOS battery.
A 2-pin SPDIF out is available for nVidia video cards to output digital audio via HDMI. However, a 4-pin SPDIF in and analog CD-in are located in the same area as the COM port, at the other end of the motherboard (bottom end, if installed on in a tower case), and far far FAR away from optical drives that are usually located at the top (again, if installed on a tower case). Most people don't use them anymore, though, since CD audio are now being read as if they are ripped (via the data cable). In fact, my Samsung SH-S223 DVD recorder doesn't even have any audio output of any kind!
In Use Running at stock settings (paired with a Q9550), the UD3R is a cool customer. With memory at a stock 1066 MHz, the board was solid like a rock. Also, temperatures for both the chipset, memory, and CPU were cool to the touch.
The Gigabyte EP45-UD3R have a lot going on in the BIOS setup. Thus, it is a life saver that when things go wrong, most of the time the BIOS would set everything back up to default or lower on the next reboot. This saves a trip going inside of the case and shorting out the clear CMOS pins.
Another nice deal is the multiple profiles you can save, so you can have a profile for summer (lower your clock speeds to lower temps), winter (raise your clock speeds since it's cooler and you have more head room), or to experiment with different FSB, memory timings, etc. You can also save your profiles to disk, but it must be FAT or FAT32 to be recognized (a USB flash drive works great). The profiles are very small in size.
The Q-Flash utility is also a great touch, which allows you to flash your BIOS from within your BIOS! No need to hunt for a flash utility, or make a bootable floppy! Just make sure you have a properly formated USB flash drive with the firmware on it, and point Q-Flash to it. You can also back up your current firmware this way as well.
If you mess up your main BIOS, the motherboard will reboot a couple times restores your firmware, which brings it back to the firmware that was included from the factory (version F6, compared to the current as-of-writing version F9). This motherboard is nearly unbrickable!
Like the Gigabyte P35-DS3L, the UD3R has a feature called M.I.T. (Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker) which allows for automatic dynamic overclocking. It works with SpeedStep as well, so you can still save power when idling without sacrificing speed. When the CPU is fully loaded (100% utilization), SpeedStep will bring the CPU to the max multiplier. Then M.I.T. will start turning up the FSB while at the CPU's max multiplier. The amount it goes up depends on the CPU you have, and where the current FSB is set at.
Of course, for a serious hardcore overclock, you'd want to do things yourself. With an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550, I was able to hit 3.6 GHz at stock vCore (8.5x 424 MHz FSB at 1.225v). This is an excellent overclock for stock voltages! Remember that the Q6600 I had before required 1.424v to even hit 3.5 GHz, and that's getting very close to a dangerous voltage!
The BIOS offers way too many settings, I decided to leave most of them set at AUTO. The only things I change are the things I understand, such as vCore (CPU's voltage) and memory voltages (which I leave stock).
Just bumping up the vCore and FSB, I was able to hit a maximum of 471 MHz FSB, giving me 8.5x 471 MHz FSB = 4.0 GHz! The vCore was still at a decent 1.35v, but temperatures on load was nearing 70c (ambient temps were 88c however).
I was able to get 500 MHz FSB going (both 8.5x and 8x for 4.25 GHz and 4.0 GHz), it was too hot for 4.25 GHz, and too unstable for 4.0 GHz. The MCH voltage (chipset) may need to be bumped up, but every time I set it away from AUTO and away from the stock value, the PC just wouldn't boot reliably!
As for features, the onboard gigabit Ethernet provided by Realtek is no slouch. Also, the ICH10R RAID is an excellent performer as well. I was able to set up a RAID 0 with my old Western Digital 36GB Raptors, but I did notice that when I flash my firmware or reset my BIOS settings, there isn't a way to set up the drives back to RAID 0 without erasing the data and starting over! Good to know, since I just had a bare install of Window 7 and did not lose anything from doing so! But a good warning to those who does: BACK UP!
The ICH10R's 6 SATA ports allow for RAID 0, 1, and 5. Also, it allows for a mixture of those RAID sets along with non-RAIDed disks. So while I was able to use the ICH10R to set up my Raptors in RAID 0, I was able to use one of the SATA ports for a single 500 GB HDD for data. Also, these ports are hot-swappable, which allows for you to hook up an eSATA port on a bracket (included with the motheboard), or front panel (HAF 922 have this), and go on your merry way. I was able to install my internal Samsung SH-S223 DVD recorder this way. Yeah, I know it was risky... but it worked!
The Gigabyte SATA2 (purple SATA connectors) only allows for RAID 0 and 1 only (as well as single non-RAID use of course). The lone PATA (green connector) is also controlled by this controller. Thankfully, the SATA ports here also are hot-swappable. The Gigabyte SATA2 controller sits on a PCI-E bus, so performance is on par with the ICH10R.
The integrated sound is no puker either. It is one of Realtek's higher end Azallia HD Audio codecs, and it seems to perform much better than their old solutions of yore. However, it's still no match for my Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatality's multiple inputs and outputs, though I could not say sound quality going from integrated to my X-Fi improved much. Good job, Realtek!
Conclusion You get a lot from a $100 board. This includes lots of SATA and USB ports, Firewire, 6-phase power regulator, and massive heatsinks for the chipset and power regulators with a heatpipe. Add to this thoughtful engineering, RAID capabilities, and excellent overclocking abilities found mostly on motherboards costing twice as much, and you'll see why I keep recommending Gigabyte's mid-range boards time and time again.
UPDATE 9/25/09 - Just by chance, I found out this motherboard is also in the list of compatible hardware if you decide to build a hackintosh! You will need to Google for guides and how-tos, but I am now running a dual-boot Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard set up without changing any of the hardware I used for this machine!
Keep this in mind if you were deciding between this motherboard and another. It's a nice inexpensive project just to add a Mac OS into the mix - just add a USB flash drive, a $30 Snow Leopard install DVD, and some time to the mix, and stir well.
The GA-EP45-UD3R introduces revolutionary GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 3 technology featuring a 2 oz copper PCB to help reduce system temperature and dramat...More at PCNation
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