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Gigabyte’s GA-EP45-UD3R has some impressive overclocking features. The BIOS lets you boost the frontside bus to a silly 1,200MHz and control the voltage of the processor, RAM and chipset. You can overclock your RAM to a maximum of 1,375MHz, and it has two BIOS chips, so you can boot up even if your BIOS settings on one are accidentally corrupted. At stock speeds, it was in the middle or near the bottom of our benchmarks. The GA-EP45-UD3R also has plenty of expansion slots and ports. There are three PCI slots, although fitting a double-slot graphics card to the PCI Express x16 slot may block access to one of the three PCI Express x1 slots. It’s one of only three Intel motherboards here to have both optical and coaxial S/PDIF ports for connecting a surround-sound amplifier. Like Asus’s P5Q Pro, it has eight SATA ports, which is more than enough for connecting multiple internal hard disks. These can also be used as eSATA ports, and a bracket is included in the box. With eight USB and two FireWire 400 ports, there’s no shortage of external connectors.
Gigabyte’s GA-EP45-UD3R is generously specified, and it’s the motherboard to buy if you need lots of expansion ports and slots. We were disappointed that it wasn’t faster in our benchmarks at its stock settings, though, and it’s expensive at just over £100 including VAT. Foxconn’s P43A is a better choice for most people.
