Review on 🔥 GIGABYTE X299 UD4 Pro Motherboard: Intel Core i9/ATX/2 M.2/ USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A/ RGB Fusion - Top Performance for LGA 2066 CPUs! by Bronson Hussain

I've had this board for about 2 weeks now. I got it on purpose because it has 2x 8-pin CPU power connectors, a VRM heatsink design, lots of m.2 slots and very good audio outputs for both front and rear onboard audio. I'm not interested in LEDs or other "gaming" features. Here are some of my thoughts: Great: + The built in sound is the best I've heard from a motherboard. I'm not a passionate music lover, but I love good sound. I will no longer be using my Fiio desktop amp with my Beyerdynamic dt880 and for the first time my highly sensitive cIEMs have no motherboard audio noise. Fantastic!+ At 4.9GHz there is enough power for the 7900x. I have my own water cooling circuit for the 7900x and the Titan X Pascal. The built-in pump port and other water-cooling features are pretty decent, although not required. + Using der8auer's method of testing the VRM cooling, I have not seen temperatures above 85°C on the back of the board or 78°C on the heatsink (the temperature sensor is sandwiched between the heatsink). and VRM and read on a multimeter.) My dyno has minimal active cooling. The only air moving through the VRM comes from the 3 front Vardar Evo fans on a 360mm radiator. It's way better than others I've seen, but I could get a different fan specifically for the VRM after removing the CPU. + No storage compatibility issues with Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB dimmers (64GB total) + Plenty of M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs, including a PCIe 4x to M.2 adapter card with a huge heatsink. Again, I have minimal airflow on this dyno, so the large M.2 heatsink is very useful. Long story short, after installing drivers and software, it messed up a bunch of things on Windows 10, including forcing changes to my VPN network adapter, stopping Intel network adapters from updating network stats in Task Manager. I ended up reinstalling the operating system and installing only the necessary drivers for the killer network adapters. I really wish Wi-Fi was Intel and not Killer. Luckily the Intel i219 Ethernet is great and I will only use it when not absolutely necessary. Gigabyte's software for using overclocking tools, RGB merging, and more is out of control. I don't need 2+ gigabytes of data running in the background just to use these tools! I've decided to just overclock and use the RBG settings in the bios instead of dealing with viruses. Creative sound bloat is also unnecessary if you don't want software getting in the way of solid audio components. The Realtek Sound Manager has many features including an equalizer, headphone impedance detection and other headphone amplifier settings. I tried the Creative Sound Blaster but removed it. I don't need FPS or MOBA mode for my headphones. My motherboard makes a HUGE coil noise from the VRM section when the CPU is pulling over 190W. I've heard GPU noise like this before, but it's twice as loud as the worst GPU I've ever heard. Luckily that only happens when you push the limit, but then again. That's why I have this car! Rendering 4k content, benchmarking, or other data work all taxing your cores causes horrible noise every time. If that bothers you, try using something like Cinebench on all cores once you have your build. It was audible but not bad at default settings, but the noise is really bad at 4.6GHz and 10+ cores. Compared to some other manufacturers, this bios is definitely ugly and tricky with some settings. Not critical, but Asus does its job much better. Final Thoughts: Considering the price, specs and noise level I don't think I would use this board again. I had to find a cheaper board with at least an 8+4 pin CPU header, use active cooling on the VRM and buy an aftermarket sound card. $499 is a crazy price for a motherboard and this one is basically great but still not worth it.