Greetings
HobartTas ,
what you mean "hacked bios"...?... 
That's what I have seen them referred to as, the actual terminology on the Tweaktown link I provided was "modified" I just called them "hacked", by the way what exactly is the status of these Bios's given that Gigabyte do have actual beta bios's on their website?
Are they
(a) official Gigabyte beta bios's that are just not yet up on the downloads section of their website? in which case they probably should be referred to as alpha bios's rather than beta's, or
(b) modified/hacked bios's done by other 3rd parties?
I can only speak from my own experience obviously, but so far, I have had no issues with F4y (4930K and 4960X tested).
Well if it does actually work then that's good enough for me, I'll get the 4930K and use the Beta bios and later replace that with an official one when it comes out.
Unfortunately, if you want to use IB-E you will need an SB-E CPU in order to flash (and if you are using a dual BIOS board like the UP5, be sure to flash both of them 
)
Not a problem as I am actually purchasing a second UP5 board, I will flash it by pulling out my existing 3820 and then replace it later with the 4930K, I forgot about the dual bios but yes it is probably a good idea to do both because if the system can't boot of the primary it will revert to the secondary bios and if that isn't the beta as well then it won't handle the IB-E cpu.
Performance wise, not really any different from 3930K/3960X tbh - proper PCI 3.0 support (Nvidia's next driver) is a plus though as opposed to having to use that hack.
I wouldn't expect it to be that much of a difference moving from a SB-E hexacore to an IB-E one. But I am moving from a quadcore to a hexacore cpu.
One other thing is I went from a 3820k to the 3930k and I didn't see really any big performance other than the cost.
Kindly permit me to demonstrate a very significant difference with something like BF3 where it lifts the minimum frame rate significantly, have a read of this article, basically you have to set hyper-threading to OFF and just use the native six cores.
http://chipreviews.com/main-feature/main-news/frostbite-2s-limit-6-core-performance-in-battlefield-3/5/ Looking at the first picture where you can see that overclocking a quadcore doesn't do much for the minimum frame rate whereas on the hexacore there is a noticeable improvement. On the second picture you can see that with hyper-threading off you get a large increase in the minimum frame rate and overclocking increases it further still to 102 FPS, turning hyper-threading off also to the quad core increases the average and max FPS but the minimum dips even more which is the reverse of what you actually want as you don't want the game jerky in places, this is principally why I have purchased the hexacore cpu. The third picture pretty well much demonstrates this, as to why this situation exists I presume it has something to do with the on chip 12MB cache where it's just right for 6 cpu's but not so good for 12.
I would wait on the bios update. You might run into more than what you are looking for. It could crash and burn.
Possibly, but if slytat got it going more or less OK then its good enough for me so I'll try it as well.
I don't really see any difference between a 3930k and a 4930k. Other than one is a sandy bridge and the other one being a ivory bridge.
I agree, there's no real point upgrading a SB-E hexacore for a IB-E hexacore. I'm getting the 4930K over the 3930K because it uses about 20-30 less watts under load and it will be much easier to cool with a high end air cooler, especially if I overclock it a bit.
If I do any thing in a upgrade I'm going to wait on AMD for their PCI-e 3.0 board and put in a FX-9370 4.4GHz or FX-9590 4.7GHz
Unfortunately, I just need the speed and grunt for GAMES ONLY and specifically the Battlefield series (BF3 now and BF4 later) and as for anything else it will be fast enough, the AMD cpu may be faster in other applications but that is of no interest to me. From what little benchmarks I have seen AMD's cpu's generally underperform Intel's and sometimes by a large margin as far as games are concerned.
P.S. I read somewhere that apparently you also have to update the Intel drivers before doing the upgrade.
P.P.S. In case anyone is interested the main reason I got this board was because other than being a good quality board I intended for it to become a ZFS nas server when it got too old for its current duties in say 5 years time or so. However, needing a backup server now I purchased ten Toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB drives and had to figure out how to deploy them, since I have the UP5 board sitting in a large Antec DF-85 case I decided to place the Toshibas in there as well.
After pondering the issue for a period of time I decided to setup this way;
(a) current config, SSD boot drive with Win7-64 + steam and other stuff 2TB drive + optical drive
(b) Solaris 11 on an old small notebook drive, 10 Toshibas in a ZFS Raid-Z2 setup (two of the drives sit in an optical slot using metal bracket adaptors and together with ambient airflow stay reasonably cool although they are slightly warmer than the others).
Everything all sits in there nicely using all 14 ports and every couple of months I just unplug the power connectors to the 3 drives used by windows and then hook up the eleven drives used by Solaris. I back everything up over the course of a day or two and flip everything back to the original config, takes about 15 minutes to do it either way, since I am using an Antec cp-850 power supply I just needed a couple of molex to sata power adapters together with one or two Sata power double adapters. With the 3820 powering the Nas I can upload to it at full Gb speeds (100-110 MB's) even using compression but for some bizarre reason I can only download from it at about 55 MB's so it's probably got to be a Solaris quirk. Also the 32GB of ram I have will allow me to experiment later on with virtualisation under Solaris once I start playing around with it. Its efficient re-use of existing hardware as I get to kill two birds with the one stone.
Anyway, many thanks to everyone here who provided assistance.
Cheers
