Overclocking
Our usual slew of benchmarks examine performance at stock speeds, levelling the playing field between basic and enthusiast X99 boards. Such insight is only instructive when ensuring that baseline performance is exactly where it should be. A £160 X99 board benchmarks very much like a £260 one.
Those boards with an enthusiast bias, like the X99-UD4P, need to be evaluated in context. This is why we're looking at the board with specific focus on how well it overclocks the CPU and memory, which is what Gigabyte is focussing on with the CPU Mode Switch. Once activated, we record the comparative performance of this board against the competition.
We swapped out the usual Corsair RAM for some 3,000MHz-rated G.Skill memory, which is on Gigabyte's certified list.
First off, Gigabyte correctly applies the XMP settings for the memory and boots at 3,000MHz speeds without issue, and this is a definite improvement over the condition of the BIOSes back in August 2014.
And it's fast, too, topping out at an impressive 3,240MHz once 1.35V is shunted down the G.Skill pack. No complaints on this front.
CPU performance, with the same cooler, is more predictable. Simply swapping it out for another Core i7-5960X is likely to provide better performance yields than changing motherboards alone.
Power consumption is good for a full-size board and lower than we'd expected. Gigabyte's voltage regulation is doing a solid job.
