GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P, The best P45 I’ve used.

Overall Rating55555

The best P45 I’ve used.

Ordered 9 of these for in-house builds. We have used foxconn, abit, and asus. Nothing matches the stability of this board. All 9 work great, with the exception of 2 that had some sort of startup delay where the fans kick on, then off, then on again. Then it boots up fine. When shutting down, the fans shut off just slightly before everything else and an alarm sounds until you press and hold the power button. We did hear of others having this problem, so we got and used the latest bios and that seemed to solve it. With Q9550 (2.83, 333×8.5 stock) we are able to get 3.77Ghz just using the tool in the bios. Stable in Intel burntest as well as 12 hour Prime95. Video conversion will often bring a system to its knees and cause BSODs where Prime95 doesn’t, but with this combination I converted a 22gb transport stream into a 4gb x.264 using ffmpeg and had no errors.
It has a dual bios, so no matter what, you can power up and solve any issue. You can also brand your bios with a 256-color BMP and in a corporate environment it is nice to not have a Monster Truck or Alien showing up first thing when you deploy a system. E-sata is a huge plus also. SATA Raid works very well, although it is slightly slower in RAID1 than I think it should be. But it is stable. Will not ever try RAID0 on onboard raid, so can’t comment there.

Update (2/6/2012): This item is currently on sale here for the lowest price I’ve seen. I also found some auctions for this item here.

The featured review for this product, GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard Electronics, was written by Clay Porter.

The average rating for this item is 5 out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.

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Reviews (2)

Victor Healey

April 6th, 2010 at 9:11 am    


Overall Rating55555

Gigabyte EP45-UD3P Outstanding Value for 2009
I wanted to replace and aged 3200Mhz Pentium D and old an 2005 main-board with some newer technology. As I am retired, I did not want to break the bank by buying ultra expensive cutting edge hardware and main-boards. If this matches your needs check out the EP45-UD3P motherboard ASAP. I did and it has been a bang up choice for 2009.

Today SATA has replaced PATA and though the EP45-UD3P motherboard supports both I am abandoning all the old relatively slow PATA devices. The EP45-UD3P has eight SATA 3.0 sockets! This means the EP45-UD3P works with the newer fast 1.5TB hard drives which require SATA 3.0 to work at maximum speed. Also you have plenty of connections for one or two Samsung OEM Dual layer Lightscribe 20x DVD in SATA which are about $25 and a great value for system builders.

The EP45-UD3P motherboard supports old Pentium 4D all the way to Duo Quad 9000 CPUs. I opted for a Q9550 after the big summer 2009 price cut made it an outstanding value. The advantage is that a quad CPU offers great support for 64 bit OS and multitasking. You can boot between 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows plus 32 and 64 bit Ubuntu Linux which is fast becoming an outstanding free alternative to anything from Microsoft. The
EP45-UD3P supports more DDR2 memory than most motherboards, 16GB for those with a 64 bit OS. That sort of future proofs your investment for awhile.

A really sharp system builder will even find it super easy to use the EP45-UD3P motherboard as the basis for adding OSx to the multi-boot OS menu. Yes aside from buying a Macintosh a hacker could build his own ‘Hackintosh’ in a heartbeat with the EP45-UD3P motherboard and the right Nvidia graphics card as long as you stay away from PATA devices. Yes you can use a few ATI cards too but the operative words here are QUICK and EASY. Think about it, you could easily have your very own Snow Leopard Hac some day. Really, who would ever want Windows Seven if they had that?

Actually a Google search for EP45-UD3P and OSx will show there are an amazing number of people buying the EP45-UD3P for that very purpose. This secret fact adds resale value to your purchase of the EP45-UD3P.

BTW the EP45-UD3P has dual CMOS and a new security technology built in that some may find useful with some of the varied OS options the main-board supports.

All in all from overclocking for games to experimenting with the best programs and OS available for any PC you will be hard pressed to find a better 775 hardware value than what the Gigabyte EP45-UD3P offers this year.


Clay Porter

April 28th, 2010 at 1:46 pm    


Overall Rating55555

The best P45 I’ve used.
Rated 5 stars.


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