GA-P67A-UD4-B3 vs. GA-P67A-UD3-B3 ?
- Thread starter hrhnick
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These are the differences I can see:
1) The UD3-B3 has two 16x PCI-E slots, but if you put anything in any of the 1x slots, it drops the second 16x slot to 1x speed. This seems really annoying to me, especially since the best way to get Wi-Fi working on a osx86 build is with a 1x PCI-E board and Apple mini-PCI adapter. If you want to use such a card, you're guaranteed to not have 16x PCI speed on both 16x slots. I'm planning to put RAID in my machine, and wish I'd gotten the UD4-B3 instead. When there are multiple PCI-E cards in the UD4-B3, it drops both 16x slots to 8x, regardless of how many 1x cards you have in there. That splits the bandwidth more evenly among the 16x devices.
2)The UD4-B3 has eSATA ports, the UD3-B3 does not. If you think you might want to add external storage, this is a consideration. You can always add an eSATA card later with the UD3-B3, but, well, see what I just wrote above about everything but the first 16x slot running at 1x with multiple cards. If you want the Apple Wi-Fi or anything else along with your eSATA card they're all going to end up running 1x PCI-E.
3) The UD4-B3 has better cooling on the capacitors around the CPU. They also advertise "12 phase power" with some kind of special voltage regulator. This might benefit overclocking, if it's what you're interested in. I'm having trouble running stable above 4.8GHz even with water cooling, and I've read about other people running 5GHz+ stable on water cooling with the i5-2500K. I'm wondering if it's the UD3-B3 that's the problem, since it's a cheap motherboard not meant for on-the-fringes OCing. Sandy Bridge is so OCable that the UD4-B3 might be worth it because it might help you run stable at 5GHz+.
Both should work fine. They both have the same Intel chipset and the same base network/audio/SATA hardware. The UD4-B3 just adds additional things.
(By the way, OCing is easy with either board. You get your voltage settings right, and then set the base multiplier to 32x and your turbo boost speeds to the multiplier you want. Running 48x I'm at 4.8GHz right now.)
1) The UD3-B3 has two 16x PCI-E slots, but if you put anything in any of the 1x slots, it drops the second 16x slot to 1x speed. This seems really annoying to me, especially since the best way to get Wi-Fi working on a osx86 build is with a 1x PCI-E board and Apple mini-PCI adapter. If you want to use such a card, you're guaranteed to not have 16x PCI speed on both 16x slots. I'm planning to put RAID in my machine, and wish I'd gotten the UD4-B3 instead. When there are multiple PCI-E cards in the UD4-B3, it drops both 16x slots to 8x, regardless of how many 1x cards you have in there. That splits the bandwidth more evenly among the 16x devices.
2)The UD4-B3 has eSATA ports, the UD3-B3 does not. If you think you might want to add external storage, this is a consideration. You can always add an eSATA card later with the UD3-B3, but, well, see what I just wrote above about everything but the first 16x slot running at 1x with multiple cards. If you want the Apple Wi-Fi or anything else along with your eSATA card they're all going to end up running 1x PCI-E.
3) The UD4-B3 has better cooling on the capacitors around the CPU. They also advertise "12 phase power" with some kind of special voltage regulator. This might benefit overclocking, if it's what you're interested in. I'm having trouble running stable above 4.8GHz even with water cooling, and I've read about other people running 5GHz+ stable on water cooling with the i5-2500K. I'm wondering if it's the UD3-B3 that's the problem, since it's a cheap motherboard not meant for on-the-fringes OCing. Sandy Bridge is so OCable that the UD4-B3 might be worth it because it might help you run stable at 5GHz+.
Both should work fine. They both have the same Intel chipset and the same base network/audio/SATA hardware. The UD4-B3 just adds additional things.
(By the way, OCing is easy with either board. You get your voltage settings right, and then set the base multiplier to 32x and your turbo boost speeds to the multiplier you want. Running 48x I'm at 4.8GHz right now.)
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