First up we have Gigabyte's flagship P55-UD6.
The P55-UD6 built around Gigabyte's signature blue PCB, and it features seven expansion slots (3 x PEG, 2 x PCIe x1, 2 x PCI), and large, aluminum heatinks on the VRM and chipset. If you look close at the heatsinks though, you'll notice that the one about in the middle of the board--in the traditional northbridge location--isn't really mounted to anything. It's sort of just floating there, connected to the VRM heatsinks via a heatpipe. This is due to the fact that, as we've mentioned already, Lynnfield based processes move virtually all of the legacy northbridge functionality, including PCI Express connectivity and a memory controller, onto the CPU die itself, so there's no need for a true northbridge chip.
The board's trio of PEG slots support SLI and CrossFire multi-GPU configurations and there's also plenty of connectivity in the I/O backplane--Gigabit LAN and HD Audio support come by way of Realtek chips and the Firewire ports are powered by a TI controller. The P55-UD6 is also outfitted with 10 SATA ports, 6 DIMM slots, which is currently a rarity with P55-based motherboards--although it is still dual-channel, a POST code error reporter, dual-Gigabit LAN, and a host of other features.
The Gigabyte P55-UD6's main claim to fame, however, is its 24 phase power design. If you look around the CPU socket you can plainly see the 24 phase design and count the components for yourself. In fact, you'll count 27 phases, but three of them are dedicated to the memory slots. The P55-UD6 is also a member of Gigabyte's Ultra Durable 3 family of products, which means it sports 2oz copper layers in its PCB, solid Japanese capacitors, Lower Rds MOSFETs, and Ferrite core chokes.
This is the motherboard we used for our overclocking tests, and we also feature a full set of benchmarks using this board later in this article. Overall, we definitely give it a thumbs up. As you'll see, performance was excellent and it found it to be very stable and overclockable too.
The P55-UD6 built around Gigabyte's signature blue PCB, and it features seven expansion slots (3 x PEG, 2 x PCIe x1, 2 x PCI), and large, aluminum heatinks on the VRM and chipset. If you look close at the heatsinks though, you'll notice that the one about in the middle of the board--in the traditional northbridge location--isn't really mounted to anything. It's sort of just floating there, connected to the VRM heatsinks via a heatpipe. This is due to the fact that, as we've mentioned already, Lynnfield based processes move virtually all of the legacy northbridge functionality, including PCI Express connectivity and a memory controller, onto the CPU die itself, so there's no need for a true northbridge chip.
The board's trio of PEG slots support SLI and CrossFire multi-GPU configurations and there's also plenty of connectivity in the I/O backplane--Gigabit LAN and HD Audio support come by way of Realtek chips and the Firewire ports are powered by a TI controller. The P55-UD6 is also outfitted with 10 SATA ports, 6 DIMM slots, which is currently a rarity with P55-based motherboards--although it is still dual-channel, a POST code error reporter, dual-Gigabit LAN, and a host of other features.
The Gigabyte P55-UD6's main claim to fame, however, is its 24 phase power design. If you look around the CPU socket you can plainly see the 24 phase design and count the components for yourself. In fact, you'll count 27 phases, but three of them are dedicated to the memory slots. The P55-UD6 is also a member of Gigabyte's Ultra Durable 3 family of products, which means it sports 2oz copper layers in its PCB, solid Japanese capacitors, Lower Rds MOSFETs, and Ferrite core chokes.
This is the motherboard we used for our overclocking tests, and we also feature a full set of benchmarks using this board later in this article. Overall, we definitely give it a thumbs up. As you'll see, performance was excellent and it found it to be very stable and overclockable too.
