Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P review

The GA-EP45-UD3P is part of Gigabyte's latest generation of Ultra Durable motherboards.

It's based on Intel's popular P45 chipset, and so supports the full range of Core 2 processors. It's a luxury motherboard, and has every feature you could reasonably expect.

Previous Ultra Durable motherboards included life-prolonging features such as solid capacitors. The latest boards double the thickness of the copper layer running through the centre of the PCB. Gigabyte claims this will not only make the board more durable and give it better heat dissipation, but that the thicker copper will also reduce electrical resistance and so improve power efficiency.

We can't easily test the board's durability, though logically it should be more resistant to being bent. We were impressed by how cool the passive heat sinks remained, a possible effect of all that extra copper. Equipped with our reference components, the GA-EP45-UD3P used 102W of power while running our benchmarks. This is a small improvement on the 108W used by our reference board, the Asus P5Q-E.

The BIOS has plenty of overclocking options should you wish to push your components beyond their recommended specifications. You can set the FSB to a ludicrous 1,000MHz, and you can tweak the voltage of just about everything. The GA-EP45-UD3P isn't the quickest board we've seen in either PCMark Vantage or Call of Duty 4, but it's close enough to the P5Q-E to make little difference for most users.

The four memory slots claim to support DDR2 1366+. You can't buy memory rated at this speed, but it does give you some overhead for overclocking DDR2 1,300MHz memory. The two PCI-E x16 slots allow you to run two compatible ATI cards in a CrossFire configuration. The three PCI-E x1 slots and two PCI slots give you plenty of room for upgrades.

There are six SATA II ports controlled by the Intel RAID controller, and these can be organised into a RAID 0, 1, 5 or 10 array. A secondary controller supports a further two SATA II ports. A bracket is provided with two eSATA ports, but these must be connected internally to ports on the motherboard.

There are eight USB2 ports, two FireWire ports and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. The motherboard has both coaxial and optical S/PDIFs for digital audio, plus the usual six audio minijacks for surround sound. The onboard audio chipset supports Dolby Digital Live, allowing you to convert any PC audio, such as games, into Dolby Digital for output to a surround sound amplifier.

The GA-EP45-UD3P is reasonably priced, given its specification, though most users won't need all its features. We can't categorically say that it will last longer than other motherboards, though Gigabyte has put a lot of thought into this. However, it will definitely use less power than most motherboards during its lifetime.

Author: Seth Barton