Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5 Review

Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5 Review

Manufacturer: Gigabyte
UK Price (as reviewed): £145.28 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): $199.99 (ex. Tax)

This review is a bit late, but we got there in the end! Our first P55-UD5 from Gigabyte somehow got a cake-like crumbs in the LGA1156 socket. We kid you not. Given the evidence, we suspect Victoria Sponge, although no one admitted to consuming the tasty treats over or even near the motherboard. In the end, we requested a replacement from Gigabyte.

We have to give Intel and/or Gigabyte credit where it is due, their products are highly resilient to confectionary attack though: despite having 6-pins in the socket damaged, it took us all day to diagnose the issue since the board still worked and overclocked. We only noticed something was wrong because the performance results were up and down like a Yo-yo and one DIMM out of two intermittently disappeared - that had us scratching our heads for a couple of days!

One new board and a complete labs purge of all cake-like materials later, and we've finally re-evaluated the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5 against other popular P55 motherboards for today's review.

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 (x16 physical)
  
• Two PCI slots
  
• Two PCI-Express x1 slots
  
• 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 3Gbps from Gigabyte (JMicron) chip
  
• Two SATA 3Gbps from JMicron JMB362
  
• 14 USB 2.0 ports - eight on rear I/O, six via pin-outs
  
• Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 Firewire supporting three ports - one via pin-outs, two on the rear I/O
  
• Realtek ALC889A 7.1-channel High-Definition audio codec with Dolby Home Theatre support

The Gigabyte bundle is very good: we're a little short on SATA cables but included are even more eSATA thanks to an additional PCI bracket adapter, bringing a total to four including the ones on the rear I/O! The manuals are pretty detailed and Gigabyte includes a separate one for its Smart6 software where a quick breeze through will let you know what it all does. If you want to find out now though, check our previous P55M-UD4 review for details.