Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD4 Review

Manufacturer: Gigabyte
UK Price (as Reviewed): £119.95 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as Reviewed): $149.99 (ex. Tax)

Micro-ATX boards seem to have gained a surprising fan base in the last year, and with boards such as the DFI LanParty JR-P45-T2RS and Asus Rampage II Gene mostly filling the fold, with the occasional MSI (X58M!) popping its head in, it's become an increasing popular form factor.

Clearly keen to get in on the act, and taking advantage of the single-chip Intel P55 chipset, Gigabyte, has designed two micro-ATX P55 boards - the P55M-UD2 and P55M-UD4, of which the "4" has SLI support and more CPU VRM hardware. It's also forty quid more expensive too, so we found out if the short-stacked blue boy is really worth the money.

Board Features

• Support for Intel Lynnfield Core i5 and Core i7 LGA1156 CPUs
  
• Intel P55 PCH
  
• Four 1.65V DDR3 DIMM slots supporting up to 16GB of memory
  
• One Realtek 8111D Gigabit Ethernet controller
  
• Two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots providing either one x16 or two x8 links
  
• One PCI-Express x4 slot (open ended)
  
• One PCI slot
  
• Six P55 SATA 3Gbps ports supporting Intel Matrix RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD
  
• One IDE port supporting two devices, one SATA and one eSATA from Gigabyte (JMicron) chip
  
• 14 USB 2.0 ports - eight on rear I/O, six via pin-outs
  
• Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 IEEE1394a Firewire supporting two ports - one via pin-outs, one on the rear I/O
  
• Realtek ALC889A 7.1-channel High-Definition audio codec with Dolby Home Theatre support

Inside the box we get four SATA cables, two of which have 90 degree connectors to connect a couple of drives neatly, or use with the oddly positioned SATA port in the middle of the motherboard. In addition there's an SLI connector, a rear I/O shield, an IDE cable and the usual manuals and driver disc. Maybe we could have done with a couple more SATA cables, but the bundle is generous enough for most.