Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6

Full Review

The Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 is a high-end motherboard based on the P55 chipset (LGA1156 Socket) that supports Intel’s current mainstream Core i5 and Core i7 quad-core Processors. With its own approach to design and features, this Gigabyte board has a lot on offer, as can also be gleaned from the Specifications and Performance tabs of this review.

This board’s support for 6 RAM modules stands out right away, even if their coloring makes it clear that only dual-channel operation is supported. A maximum of 16GB can be installed, and perhaps more too if modules of 4GB density are supported. It also supports multi-GPU operation with Nvidia (SLI) or ATI (CrossFireX) cards. You can use three PCI-E 2.0 graphics cards, but only the first slot supports x16 operation, the other two support a bandwidth of x8 and x4 respectively. Thankfully the positioning of these slots is such that using even long dual-slot GPUs won’t block access to its 10 SATA ports and one IDE port. Besides the internal storage ports, the board also offers 4 more storage ports - two eSATA ports at the back panel, and two eSATA ports through a bracket.

The first PCI-E x1 slot though, is as good as a lost cause for using “cards” and is only useful for directly plugging in chips, with this layout. Examining the board’s features, it offers SP/DIF digital/analog jacks, 6 audio jacks, 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports, 8 USB ports at back-panel, Firewire ports, all-solid capacitors, and multi-phase power (24 phases) for the Processor. It uses passive cooling with heatsinks on two crucial chips, and two heatsink-sets for capacitors around the Processor, which is good for overclocking. There are also promises to save energy, plenty of LEDs all over, detailed menus in the BIOS for overclocking, and direct-access buttons to power on/restart system/clear the CMOS settings. A 2-way SLI connector is bundled as part of the package. As with all of its high-end boards, this Gigabyte board sports “Dual BIOS” so if one fails the other can take over. Another feature that Gigabyte speaks about on this board, is the “dynamic energy saver”.

To prevent bottlenecks, we use the best possible components for our test rig. All tests were run using a Core i7 870 (2.93 GHz with HT) Processor, ThermalTake CPU cooler, Intel X25-M 80GB SSD, two modules of DDR3 2000MHz Kingston HyperX RAM and a Radeon HD4870X2 graphics card, all powered by a Tagan BZ-1300 PSU. Performance in benchmarks was very good, as expected. While running PC Mark Vantage at default clock speeds, we saw scores that hovered around 8950 with a variance of only 10 points, and CineBench scores around 14800. Results of other system benchmarks and HDD/RAM tests can be seen in the “Performance” tab.

With regard to over-clocking potential, this Gigabyte board nudged slightly ahead of an Asus board based on the same chipset. We saw a minor difference in the overclocking (OC) performance of the two. Our reference Core i7 870 has a default clock speed of 2.93 GHz (133MHz bus with a multiplier of 22x). The Asus board managed to reach an OC of 4.06 GHz (214MHz x 19), while the Gigabyte touched 4.12 GHz (217MHz x 19). The difference might look small, but keep in mind this was on a simple air-cooled machine, so liquid-cooling might achieve much more. In both cases, we required the system to remain stable and not overheat.

Bottom Line

If you want support for Intel’s higher-end LGA1366-based Core i7 Processors, you must use a board based on the X58 chipset instead, with which you can get support for triple-channel memory and PCI-E x16 lanes for maximum triple-GPU performance. For all else, the GA-P55-UD6 motherboard does very well in all departments. It has a tremendous number of ports on offer for storage and USB, besides the slots for graphics and RAM. Only the price premium holds back its rating a bit.