GIGABYTE GA-X79-UP4 LGA 2011 Intel X79 USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: Incredible price, no slouch on features. My board came flashed ready for the Ivy Bridge E CPU's. Extremely easy setup, built like a tank. Plenty of expansion. I was up and running in minutes, BIOS setup took about 5 minutes, memory setup was a breeze with XMP.

Cons: The only issue I've had with the board has to do with the SATA ports - the first two are SATA3 controlled by the X79 chipset, next 4 are SATA2 controlled by X79 and the last 2 are SATA3 controlled by the on-board Marvell controller... problem is, the X79 SATA3's do NOT show up in Windows as disc 0/1, but 2/3. The Marvell drives show up as 0/1. Keep this in mind when installing your OS! Other than that, really no major issues.

Overall Review: I haven't overclocked this system yet, but honestly, why bother? Complete stable, no issues at all almost a month in. This board will be a solid platform for me for MANY years to come - could NOT be happier with the purchase. Of all the boards out there, this is the one to get. Doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the high end Asus boards, but if you want a great, solid, no-nonsense X79 board - this is the one.

Specs:
Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4
Intel i7 4820K
32GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1866
Intel 120GB 520 SSD
1TB WD Black, 2TB Seagate
EVGA GTX770
Corsair 750D
Corsair AX860
Windows 8 Pro

3DMark Ice Storm: 139806
3DMark Cloud Gate: 20883
3DMark Fire Strike: 6822

Windows Rating of 8.2

Pros: Small ATX form not E-ATX. Kinda worked for a while. Its black and grey.

Cons: Board out of the box had memory issues where XMP profiles wouldn't work and had to manually enter memory settings. Board would not overclock at all. And was a real pain to make 32gb or ram run at 1866mhz. Ran for over a year then the marvel sata controller started not recognizing drives and then a week later I started having huge stability issues with the board and microsluttering while playing games. After a year of messing around with this board I've given up and going to buy an evga dark board and sell this junk...

Overall Review: Gigabyte has always been a good standby but I'm very disappointed in this board. Should of spend the extra 100 bucks and bought an asus or evga board....