Gigabyte X299 UD4 PRO Aorus Ultra Gaming Pro Chipset LGA 2066 DDR4 SDRAM ATX Motherboard - Black

This review is going to focus on one issue with an otherwise perfectly good motherboard and some people may view these issues as positive or irrelevant.I do not understand how or why, but for some reason the audio output is very limited, rather like with smart phones, where you get the warning "Exceeding this volume is very dangerous for your hearing" and you just click "Ignore", the problem is there is no warning or "Ignore" button on this motherboard and Gigabytes version of a safe volume, is maybe 50% to 75% of my Pixel 2 XL.(yes, i have minor hearing issues and from time to time a do like to turn up the volume a little to high)Then the audio drivers have this dreadful software feature that thinks it is "Smart" and adjusts lots of things to "improve" your listening, none of them improve anything. But one of it's main tweaks is it automatically lowers volume when playing vocals, but is not very smart, so the volume jumps up and down through out a song, especially if there is about 0.5 seconds between vocals, really giving a vertigo effect, especially if you know what it should sound like.You can turn the smart audio improvements off, but after every restart, they are back on and the setting to do so is hidden in a separate secret bit of Gigabytes own audio software.It is such a shame, after video, audio output is so important, yet so basic to get correct and this has been done so badly they have screwed this really basic element up so badly it is having a major impact on the product.The bit where you can and Gigabyte actively encourage with easy to use tools included to control and override the CPU, but just no control or override for the audio output. Almost like Gigabyte saying, yes we will help you to brick thousands of pounds of hardware if you would like, but you clearly are not intelligent enough to control what you listen to.

Bios is not very intuitive

I purchased it because it is supposed to support 1 TB of RAM as it is written in the motherboard propertiesI tried to put 256 GB but it only worked on 64 GBI tried repeatedly and did not know that there was a secret way to do it

The motherboard was described online and came labelled as the Aorus board which has 3 M2 sockets and a rear USB-C socket. Inside was a standard UD4 PRO board which is similar, but has 2 M2 sockets and no USB-C.