Sadly I've loaned my crystal ball
What I really find curious is that other boards including the lower tier UD3 and the upper tier GAMING G1 have progressed beyond the UD5 in terms of BIOS updates at this point. The UD3 has seen a number of stable releases, the most recent being this month. In comparison, the UD5 is littered with betas and no stable release in the last 5-6 months.
I don't wish to read into it or draw any conclusions, I just want to know that development has not ceased on the UD5 and that the board will not be left in an unfinished/beta state. I would like to see at least one more stable bios to integrate the fixes from the previous three betas and to bring the UD5 to parity with the other boards.
On an aside, how do you like this board? I'm a fan of the UDx series and was looking at this board a few days ago as my step to Z170 and skylake. What has your experience been thus far if you wouldn't mind sharing?
I love the board; the features, layout, and design are right on. It's got everything I really want from the GAMING series without the unnecessary opulence. However, I had some initial bumps and I need more time to confirm that it's finally stable.
When I first upgraded I continued to use my existing Windows 7 boot disk and was experiencing occasional blue screens with codes pertaining to disk failures. I then upgraded to Win10 and was still experiencing some stability issues, but thankfully I got the idea to try booting from the Win10 installation media and doing a clean install. I realized that my disk was still using the old MBR format (not GPT, which is required for UEFI BIOS). Also, at least one system/recovery partition was not present. The Win10 upgrade tool did not warn me about any of this. Long story short, I allowed the clean install to format my disk with the proper partitions and that improved my situation a lot.
The remaining issue I had was that every other time I'd shut down my computer, Windows would crash upon next startup. Coincidentally Microsoft just released a number of updates to address bootup issues, and I'm pleased to say that I haven't had a crash since. It's still early but the Windows Reliability Monitor is not showing any Windows failures in the last week. (See thumbnail)
In terms of real-world performance and how it feels to me in use, I'm quite happy. Blown away even- but consider that I'm upgrading from an i7-920 system so it's a big change. I run a couple linux VM's with VirtualBox, and do some gaming. With 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-2400 I'm happy as a clam.
The only other precaution I have is that the Skylake chips are known to have issues with regard to thin packaging. You can very easily crush them, so take care when tightening the connectors for the heat sink.
Now I just wish GIGABYTE would see to a stable BIOS update and I can find some closure
