CeBIT overnight testing - Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5 - Gigabyte P55-UD5
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 04 Mar 2010

There are many Gigabyte’s P55 motherboards, which are guaranteed to suit the needs of various categories of customers. Our UD5 version is positioned as the second from the top, with the UD6 being the only one higher. Basically the only difference is the number of memory slots. With UD5, you get four DIMMs, and with UD6 you get six. That does not mean that UD6 supports triple channel, as that is reserved for X58 and the I7 series 900 CPUs, but rather that you can add more memory. There are limitations though, as in order to use all six DIMMs, you need four of them to be single sided.  On the UD5, you can use all four double-sided modules, which brings you to the same maximum memory capacity.

Although from looking at the motherboard and its cooling solution you could think that there is a standard north + southbridge, the lower heatpipe cooler behind the PCI-E slots cools only the additional storage controllers. In total, there are 10 SATA ports on the motherboard, plus the two eSATA ports on the back panel. These are powered by the JMicron JMB362 chip located behind the I/O backpanel. Gigabyte also included its own SATA2 chip that supplies two SATA ports and an IDE connector. All in all, there are four chips that deal with storage, the Intel ICH10R, the Gigabyte’s SATA2 chip and two JMicron JMB362 controllers.

From the other Gigabyte specific features we would like to mention the really packed backpanel, and the three physical x16 PCI-E slots, along with two PCI-E x1 and two older PCI slots. You will however rarely use all of them as they are packed together so there isn’t much chance of using for example the second PCI-E x1 slot with a graphics card installed in the first x16 slot and so on. It is however nice to have many options. The board is full ATX size so you can’t install it in some smaller cases, but that’s the price you pay for so many connectors. If you have a smaller case and want a P55 motherboard, you’ll need to look at the GA-P55M series of motherboards.

The onboard sound is based on a Realtek ALC889a with 3.5mm connectors for 7.1 sound as well as an optical and coaxial SPDIF connectors. There’s also an onboard SPDIF pinout to enable NVIDIA’s graphics cards to transfer the audio through HDMI connectors. The chip supports all the latest codecs, including Dolby Digital TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. There are two network connectors powered by two Realtek’s RTL8111D chips. Of course, both are rated at 1000 Mbit/s. Gigabyte also designed this board to be a part of its UltraDurable3 lineup, featuring 2oz copper PCB, Japanese capacitors, lower RDS MOSFETS and ferrite core chokers.
 

On a software side, the board comes with a Smart 6 suite, which offers accessibility to various motherboard features from the OS, manage security and data and so on.

To benchmark the GA-P55-UD5 we paired it with Intel’s Core i5 750 CPU, which represents the middle range of Socket 1156 CPUs, but is basically an i7 with HyperThreading disabled.

The rest of the system consisted of:

- OCZ Platinum PC3-12800 DDR3 2x2 GB
- Western Digital RaptorX WD1500AHFD-00RAR1
- PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 1KW-SR
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285
- Intel Core i5 750

One of the most important parts of the motherboard is its BIOS. Gigabyte used the modified Phoenix’s AwardBIOS. Along with standard features, Gigabyte added a new menu called Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker. It offers some predefined settings that allowed our i5 750 to be overclocked from 2.66 to 3.2 GHz. With some additional tweaking, we were easily able to raise the CPU clock to 3.6 GHz.