Gigabyte P55-UD6 LGA1156 Motherboard Review‏

Conclusion

When we first saw a prototype P55-UD6 at Computex, it was hard not to be impressed since it had an industry-first 24-phase power design and six memory slots. When this model was finally revealed in retail form, we were glad to see that it hadn't lost any of what made it unique, and had actually gained a sleeker design and an improved cooling system. With no Extreme model in sight, this is the model that would reign supreme atop Gigabyte's P55 model lineup next to the UD7.


Now many have labeled this motherboard as excessive. The 24-phase power design is incredibly beefy considering the fact that we don't expect there to be six or eight-core processors to be available for the LGA1156 platform. However, the advantage of an overbuilt PWM is that the load gets spread across many MOSFETs, resulting in lower temperatures, potentially greater reliability, and lower power consumption, which we did see. The second criticism is leveled towards the six memory slots. I'm not going to go to so far as to suggest that the two additional DIMM slots are useless, since there optimistically might be some people with six single-sided DDR3 modules laying around, but they do indeed serve a dubious purpose for literally 99% of consumers.

Aside from the aforementioned design features, the P55-UD6 does come with quite a few interesting new solutions. The dual-purpose eSATA/USB Combo ports are obviously very clever since they give the consumer greater flexibility when it comes to how many devices he/she can plug into their system. Most agree that eSATA is great, but it is still not widely used, and with the immimnent proliferation of USB 3.0 this is another promising standard that is likely to go the way of the Dodo bird.

Legacy lovers will be glad to know that Gigabyte have included both IDE and floppy connectors on this motherboard, which is getting increasingly rare nowadays. As we have come to expect on higher-end Gigabyte motherboards, this model features 2 Gigabyte LAN ports and 2 dedicated RAID controllers feeding 4 SATA ports, which means that if you include the P55 PCH's 6 RAID-capable SATA ports, you can run up to 5 RAID arrays on it. This level of hardware redundancy obviously applies to the BIOS as well, thanks to the two onboard BIOS chips. Speaking of BIOS, the redesigned MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T) section is great in our eyes. With an ever increasing numbers of settings and options, compartmentalizing is a must or you end up with needlessly long and complex BIOS sections. This new layout is perhaps not as fast the as traditional one, but it should be less overwhelming to novices wanting to try their hand at overclocking.

On the software front, Gigabyte have gone all out with the P55 series. Dynamic Energy Saver 2 and EasyTune6 are slightly refreshed but still effectively the same, but it's the other utilities that are truly interesting. The Smart TPM hardware encryption feature now allows users to lock protected data remotely using a bluetooth-enabled mobile phone. Also using bluetooth, the AutoGreen feature can put your system in to a low power state when it doesn't sense your mobile phone nearby. This is some very cool technology, but Gigabyte kind of dropped the ball a little bit since there is no on-board bluetooth-receiver on the P55-UD6. Sure, you can buy a bluetooth USB adapter on eBay for a few bucks, but considering the UD6's price it should be built into the motherboard.

In the overclocking deparment the P55-UD6 excelled where it mattered most: the CPU core clock. It pushed our i5-750 and i7-870 processors to 4.15Ghz and 4.1Ghz respectively, which is a good bit higher what we were able to achieved on the overclocking-oriented ASUS Maximus III Formula (MIIIF). It couldn't quite match the MIIIF when it came to BCLK and memory overclocking, but in both cases the UD6's results were less than 1% lower. While we were initially a little disappointed that Gigabyte have not created a brand new automatic overclocking solution, the venerable Quick Boost feature integrated into the EasyTune 6 utility proved surprisingly good. With a mere click of a button and a reboot, it overclocked both our chips to 3.8Ghz at a reasonable vCore (1.34V) and decent memory clocks too (DDR3-1600). The CAS 10 memory timings weren't brilliant though. Nevertheless, as a whole these results are better than what we achieved on highly touted new auto-overclocking technologies from ASUS and MSI. Stability throughout our overclocking adventures was absolutely bullet proof.

Throughout our benchmarks, the P55-UD6 proved to be the fastest P55 motherboard that we had tested. However, this was largely because Gigabyte have cleverly upped the stock BCLK from 133Mhz to 136Mhz. This slight 2.2% overclock might be seem insignificant, but it does translate into performance improvements across the board. If you force the FSB to 133Mhz, then the UD6 performs very much on par with the MIIIF, which is a very fast motherboard in its own right.

This motherboard gets our Dam Good award since it does everything well while being the most feature-rich P55 motherboard that we've come across and although it doesn't wear its overclocking capabilities on its sleeve, it absolutely exceled in the overclocking department. At this point in time the only serious knock against this model is the availability P55A-UD6, which is effectively the same motherboard, but with SATA 6Gb/s and USB 3.0 support. Having said that, you are looking at a roughly $40 price premium for the P55A model at most retailers, so it is up to you whether these forward-looking technologies are worth the extra money.



Pros

- Solid performance.
- Excellent layout.
- 2-Way CrossFireX & 2-Way SLI capability.
- Superior manual overclocking capabilities.
- Best automatic overclocking results yet.
- Very good voltage regulation & output.
- Impressive overall connectivity.
- 6 fan headers.
- Convenient new BIOS layout.
- IDE & Floppy connectors
- DualBIOS chip.
- Comprehensive software suite.


Cons
- No integrated bluetooth to take full advantage of the comprehensive software suite.
- With six memory slots you would expect it to support 24GB of DDR3 RAM, not 16GB like every other P55 motherboard.
- No voltage read points.
- Large CPU coolers + tall memory heatspreaders can cause installation annoyances. This is technical limitation though, so Gigabyte is not really to blame.
- A dual-slot graphics card in the 3rd PCI-E x16 slot will overhang the motherboard (unlikely configuration).

Our thanks to Gigabyte for making this review possible!