Gigabyte P55-UD6 LGA1156 Motherboard Review‏

A Closer Look at the P55-UD6

Without further ado, here is the P55-UD6 in all its glory:


Upon first glance the first thing that jumps out at you is obviously the 6 memory slots. While this is a common sight on X58 motherboards, this is the only P55 model with this unique design feature. When it comes to layout, the P55-UD6 is almost perfect. The 8-pin CPU power connector, power button, 24-pin ATX power connector, floppy connector, SATA ports, USB and FireWire headers are located on the edge of the motherboard, or as close as feasibly possible. Ideally the IDE connector would also be on the edge, but there simply isn't any room left. When it comes to the overall theme, it is business as usual for this Gigabyte model, with the now widely recognized blue and white colour scheme.


Without question the centerpiece of this motherboard is Gigabyte's new 24-phase power design. Although first introduced on this model, this new PWM design will find its way on quite a few higher-end motherboards from Gigabyte. Overkill? Perhaps, but at least the load gets spread across many MOSFETs, resulting in lower temperatures and potentially greater reliability as well. Although perhaps not immediately apparent, the P55-UD6 does have a fair bit less capacitors surrounding the CPU socket than we have seen on some other P55 motherboards, which should please those who utilize more extreme cooling methods and need to insulate the area around the socket.


Now the MOSFET heatsinks are not exactly the prettiest that we have ever seen, and the fact that are they mismatched is a bit weird, but they do their work quite well thanks to the thick heatpipe. For those who are curious, the P55-UD6 is outfitted with a Foxconn socket and retention module. There were a few incidents with this socket across several brands, but the likelihood of a catastrophic failure happening to you (even under extreme OC'ing conditions) is not any greater than having a capacitor rupture or MOSFET fail, which is to say very, very unlikely.


The second centerpiece of the P55-UD6 is obviously the six memory slots. Now you are obviously wondering how Gigabyte have managed to outfit this motherboard with a triple-channel memory design when the Lynnfield LGA1156 processors have an integrated memory controller that only features a dual-channel memory interface. Well the short answer is that they haven't done anything magical on this motherboard, they have merely split each channel across three memory slots. The upside of this is obviously greater maximum memory support, right? No. This motherboard supports 16GB of DDR3, just like every other P55 motherboard out there. The two additional memory slots can be used with single-sided memory modules, which means they are relegated to 1GB or rare, ultra-pricey 2GB single-sided modules. So in short, yeah it's a gimmick that pretty much no one will ever make use of.

Just to be clear, when you install two or four memory modules on this motherboard, they will run in dual-channel mode. There is no performance hit unless you install six modules.


As you can see, Gigabyte have outfitted this motherboard with phase LEDs for the six memory slots. They have also included 4 phase LEDs to indicate the phase status of the CPU VTT (GD1-2) and memory (MD1-2).


Now those of you who are familiar with P55 motherboards will reasonably assume that this heatsink is covering the P55 PCH, but you would be wrong. This heatsink is merely there to cool the JMicron JMB362 and GIGABYTE SATA2 RAID controllers that supply the four white SATA II 3Gb/s ports and the IDE connector. Obviously the six light blue right-angle SATA II (3Gb/s) ports are supplied by the P55 chipset.


Gigabyte have outfitted this model with a handy debug LED and colour coded front panel header. Foregoing headers, the board also features an onboard reset switch and clear CMOS button. A Gigabyte trademark, the P55-UD6 features two physical BIOS chips ensuring instant recovery in the case of an improper BIOS update or nasty virus.