Gigabyte P55A-UD6: SATA and USB 3 are here!

The board I am reviewing today is the Gigabyte P55A-UD6

You will notice that there are many similarities between the standard P55-UD6 board. The one difference and it is a major one is the addition of usb 3.0 and sata 3.0 support on a select few ports.

Here are some of the strong points I see just overlooking the board
+Large heatpipe cooler covering all devices, and the obscenely high number of power phases (24 of them).
+Cooler allows fitment of large tower cooler without any fitment issues.
+10 serial ata ports 6 onboard controlled by the P55 chipset one pair controlled by a add in Jmicron controller (esata). One pair controlled by Marvell chipset for sata 3 6.0 Gbps
+Onboard power and clear Cmos buttons for ease of use outside of the case.
+14 total usb ports, 8 via rear panel and 2 usb 3.0 on rear panel via the NEC add on chip and 4 via the onboard headers.
+24 Phase CPU power for extreme stability under heavy loading or high end overclocks.
+rear panel ps2 dual use keyboard or mouse port.
+Onboard post code LCD display for diagnosis of posting or bootup issues

This board has many great features. And looks to be a very solid built board. Here are a few issues I did see with the setup

+ When enabling SATA 3.0/USB 3.0 in bios primary pci-e slot drops from 16x to 8x
+When using 2 cards in a Crossfire or SLI configuration USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 is not available.

Overall when considering the setup, Until either there is a chipset offering more PCI-e lanes than the 16 offered by the 1156 CPU the implementation of the new SATA and USB modes are very well handled.

3 3 3 Onboard Acceleration

All of the new features added to this board represents the advertised 3 3 3 Onboard Acceleration system.

It is comprised of 3 systems of course:
> Sata 3.0 support Via add on chipset
> USB 3.0 support Via NEC add on controller chip
> USB power 3x via more and stronger power circuits feeding the USB ports

The major plus side of each feature will be detailed below

Sata 3.0 support:
Allows double the throughput on each of the 2 ports that support SATA 3.0. Also has the capability to be run in a RAID0 configuration which will give you 4x the throughput of a single SATA 2.0 port.

USB 3.0 support:
Standard USB 2.0 runs at 480 Mbps The new USB 3.0 runs at a blazingly fast 5Gbps. So imagine where we used to move 25gb to a USB hard drive and it would take up to 14 minutes under ideal situations. The same amount of data transferring to a USB3.0 device will transfer in approximately 70 seconds, or just over 1 minute.

USB Power 3x:
Allows a much higher amount of power to external USB devices which will in turn allow far more usb devices, and as seen by non external powered usb hard drives of the past which required 2 usb connections to have enough power to transfer effectively, With this new available power the same can be achieved with just one usb connection. Not to mention with the higher amount of power more devices will be allowed to be connected to one port via a usb hub with far less issues.

Testing

Unfortunately I have run into some difficulties getting my hands on some USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 Devices for testing at this time, and the Review will be updated with comparisons once the hardware is available.

Installation

Installation is quite easy as it is a standard ATX layout, and all screw holes are easily accessible. I found it quite easy to even remove and reinstall single screws with the board mounted in the case and standing upright.
Installation of most single slot cooled Physx cards in bottom slot appears to not be an issue at all with the slot placement. The 1394 port is above the lowest 4x pci-e (Physx) slot can be possible issue depending upon placement of your 1394 header.

Bundled Accessories

This board comes a very complete accessories selection.
>SLI connector (a single flexible 2 way sli bridge)
>Sata cables (a total of 4 yellow cables 2 with right angle plugs on one end)
>a single IDE cable
>Full Motherboard manual including motherboard driver/software cd
>Multi language manual
>IO shield
>Smart 6 manual
>Smart TPM manual

Bios Layout

The bios you will see is very similar to the P55 boards I have seen from Gigabyte. It has a option for enabling the higher speed USB and SATA ports. Otherwise it is what you have come to expect from Gigabyte bios. Excellent overclocking options and plenty of misc options for custom configuration of the board. Here is the main bios when you first enter MIT

Test setup

Motherboard: Gigabyte P55A-UD6
CPU: Core I7 870
Memory: Kingston DDR3 2000 Mhz Cas8 2x1gb
Hdd: Western digital 320 GB
Graphics card: Gigabyte GTX 295
CPU cooling: Prolimatech Megahalems with Skythe ultra kaze 3000RPM fan
CPU cooling (extreme overclock) Copper/ALU Dice pot
PSU: FSP Everest 1010W

Getting started overclocking

I started pretty much like I always do, just bumping up the Bclk to see where I could get it. I found the board overclocked extremely well and did not seem to struggle at all and saw over 4 ghz without an issue on air. The voltage granularity was very fine and had a lot of voltage options at very small steps which makes fine tuning much easier

Benchmark testing

These tests will show how the system handles the common benchmarks setup to show how the system performance and efficiency is at stock settings. Wprime is a Multi threaded test I run which uses all cores to crunch out numbers. The amount of time it takes is basically your score. The faster you can do it the better your system is running.

Stock

Here is the overclocked run of the exact same test. Just like my previous reviews, you will see that it scales pretty much the same as other Gigabyte boards. Performance on these new cpu’s greatly improves with overclocking without a large heat dump.

Now for 3dmark vantage, In this test We will see if a dual gpu card scales differently with cpu frequency higher.

On the left is the stock single card Dual GPU run, and on the right is the overclocked run with the 295.

Gaming overclock testing

These tests are to show how well the board scales in real life gaming situations. I tested it with 16x and 8x Pci-e Bandwidths to see if there was any markable difference between running the Dual gpu card in the 8x slot and the severity of the performance impact.

The games used are Crysis and Resident Evil 5. I used these games on the previous test and the seemed to represent very well. Crysis being very graphics intensive Will show any differences between the 8x and 16x pci-e bus.

First up is Resident Evil at 16x:

Next up is Resident Evil at 8x:

and heres one with the mild overclock

Next test is Crysis, like stated this will show any scaling issues between 8x and 16x

Here is the 16x run:

But heres with 8x:

and heres one with the mild overclock

One very important thing to note is that YES with a dual gpu card you do see a bottleneck with a 8x bus, but then again at stock cpu speed on a 8x bus with a single 295 this thing still was a lil below 60 AVG FPS on high. Not to mention for some reason, and I tested it multiple times for consistency but on the 8x bus the minimum FPS actually was higher… so it did not spike downward nearly as badly. Why? I am not sure, possibly with the bottleneck it kept the card a little more busy and therefore did not droop in performance at all. But I repeated the same results over 7 passes to withing + or – 1fps on minimum FPS. So you can run crysis on this beast on high at playable framerates with a single 295.

Xtreme overclock testing
For this section I decided to see how this setup handled the cold, and the results were quite surprising. The board ran very easily all the way up to 4.8ghz. Some 2d benches were easily obtainable up to 5ghz or so, but I believe fine tuning and cooling quality becomes a huge issue when pushing any further than this. I made these runs on dry ice/acetone mix, which was ideal for an unloaded temp of approx -70C. I did see as you will see on my benchmark screenshots that my results were right within the range of the other power users who have benched similar setups on liquid nitrogen. That speaks very highly to the overall strength, durability and overall capability of this board.

BUNDLED SOFTWARE

This board just like the micro ATX board comes with the Smart 6 software which opens up quite a numerous amount of possibilities.

>Smart Quickboot: An advanced sleep method that allows almost instantaneous boot
>Smart Quick boost: simple one click overclocking
>Smart recovery: Allows you to easily roll back settings to a previous time so you can quickly recover from a system issue
>Smart Dual bios: A backup so no matter how bad the bios can be damaged the backup will reflash and recover for you.
>Smart Recorder: Advanced and easy Pc monitoring
>Smart Timelock: Time Controller for PC

The board also comes with the Dynamic Energy Saver 2 which allows hardware/software to coincide together to help tweak down any unnecessary power usage in order to save you just that much more on your power bill when you dont need the extra power or punch this system can deliver.

Conclusion and final thoughts

This board layout is superb, it has the power button in an ideal location so that even with board fully hooked up in a benching configuration it is accessible. The reset and clear CMOS buttons are bot located at the edge of the pcb so that even if using multiple full length dual slot cards in the board will still allow usage. Also with a dual gpu card I can say that it performed flawlessly not to mention under the 8x pcie bandwidth the minimum seen FPS in crysis was actually higher and the card did not have nearly as much choppiness with the card in the physical 8x slot.

I believe with the advertised results and sata 3.0 ssd’s and USB3.0 flash drives there are going to be a lot of reasons to want this board, besides its excellent performance the availability of such high I/O’s just adds to the list.

Pros:
+SATA 3.0 and USB3.0 that should be enough but theres more.
+Excellent bios, very easy to work with
+very cool looking racing stripe cooler design just like the Micro board
+Every option you can think of and im sure some you couldn’t
+Excellent board layout, even with full length card most everything is usable.

Cons:

-With 2 cards installed in system you cannot run sata 3.0 as it uses 8x pci-e so you have either tradeoff single 8x card and the enhanced IO performance, or better PCI-e performance but no sata 3.0

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Review written and photographed by Shannon/Punx223
Edited and submitted by Romdominance

Over the past few weeks I have had the great opportunity to work with the Gigabyte EX58-UD5.
Mind you this is my first major full time venture into the X58 1366 socket platform, so let’s continue.

First of all a great amount of thanks goes to Gigabyte for providing the board to test with. I have used many Gigabyte boards in the past, and if this board is nearly as easy to use or as easy to overclock as the previous, I do not see how all of the other motherboard manufacturers stay in business.

We start with an overlook of the entire board to see how well it is laid out, and any possible issues we may encounter. There were a few things I did notice with the layout. I see the chipset cooler appears to be very similar to the one I previously have seen on the EP45-UD3P, which shares not only its styling but hopefully its excellent cooling characteristics.

+ Large heatpipe cooler

+ Cooler very well laid out to allow fitment of most large aftermarket coolers without issue.

+ Very low profile but efficient southbridge portion of cooler completely clears any large graphics cards.

+ Inclusion of a 4x slot for usage of non graphics cards (graphics cards will not fit in slot as the leg going to the southbridge cooler would be in the way.)

+ 10 total serial ata ports (6 “blue” controlled ICH10R southbridge, 4 “white” controlled by 2 different Jmicron controllers) for a very large amount of drive expandability.

+ Onboard power and clear Cmos buttons for ease of use outside of the case.

+ Onboard  2 digit post display to assist with potential no post condition diagnosis.

+ 8 rear IO panel usb’s plus 4 main available from the onboard headers

+ 12 Phase CPU power for ultimate stability when pushing overclocks or heavily loaded situations.

+ Onboard power phase, temperature, and overclock LED’s give you a real time look into how your system is running.

That is just the start of the features that I love about this boards layout.  There are also a few things that concern me about the layout and may be problematic to potential users.

- Lowest Pci-e slot location: If running Tri SLI with dual slot cooled cards you would need a case with 8 expansion slots, whereas most cases have 7

- X58 chipset only provides 32 Pci-e lanes, so tri sli setups will be 16x8x8x  this is actually very common.

- Onboard power phase status and overclock LED’s can be quite bright, and if in a windowed case can be overpowering.

As you can see there are some things to look at when thinking of this board,   but otherwise the board layout and coloring scheme is very well laid out and subtle enough.  In a world where off the wall color schemes and UV reactive seems to be the norm.  I found this board to be a peaceful break from that, as its styling to me was very nice subtle and yet functional.

Installation

Installation turned out to be as easy as any motherboard I have ever done.  It carries the standard ATX layout and all connections for the most part are located at the immediate edges of the board to allow for easy routing and cable management.  You will find that the IO shield does have covers over the Network ports that do need to be bent back, be sure to do so as that would be quite troublesome to do once the board is completely installed.

When testing a few cases for installation I did notice that the screw midway down the board below the sata ports can be difficult to get to,  otherwise it installed with the greatest of ease (unlike compared to a few other boards I have tested recently.)

The board actually has both keyboard and mouse PS2 ports.  Something that is starting to disappear in a lot of boards these days,  but a welcome addition for any legacy user that is ready to upgrade systems but loves they’re old keyboard.

Bundled Accessories

The board comes a very complete accessory selection. These include SLI connectors (both a flexible dual SLI and a rigid 3 way SLI), sata cables (a total of 4 yellow cables with right angle plugs on one end), floppy and IDE cables, e-sata bracket with included power cable and e-sata cable, full Motherboard manual including motherboard driver/software cd, multi language manual, and of course an IO shield.

Bios Layout

The bios is pretty much a standard Award bios, with the addition of the first menu “MIT”  or “Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker”. This section is very intuitive and very easy to use for the overclocking of pretty much every component of the system.  I found this area very easy to use,  and very easy to learn compared to many boards out there. The bios offers full ability to overclock the system, and also offers the CIA which is basically a small safe overclock the board will do for you automatically without having to be too deep into settings (definitely a major plus for any novice overclocker)

I did find that there were a few settings that seemed odd.   For instance the QPI  link speed slow mode was extremely too slow   whereas the slowest realistic speed can be a bit too high at certain high Bclk situations.

Also under advanced clock controls you have your drive settings along with skews, and the pci-e freq and the CIA feature I mentioned earlier

The memory timings are well laid out and very nice to be able to setup each channel individually.

Voltages are well laid out as well,   but I have found that this board does very well with auto voltages especially for moderate or 24/7 overclocks. All to often in other boards, auto settings can be inadequate for anything beside initial startup…this is a refreshing change and should help some as they begin to overclock with this board.

Test setup

Motherboard: Gigabyte X58-UD5
CPU: Core I7 920 D0 stepping
Memory: Kingston DDR3 2000 Mhz Cas8 3x1gb
Hdd: Patriot SSD 32gb Qty2  in raid level 0
Graphics card: Gigabyte GTX 260 Super overclock
CPU cooling: Promiliatech Megahalems with Scythe ultra kaze 3000RPM fan
PSU: Corsair HX 1000

Getting started overclocking

First things first I decided to test with each of the auto overclocks to see how the board worked,   and as expected it definitely pulled off the overclocks and without a hitch.   They were very simple overclocks  but then again its a free eprformance boost and gives you a decided jump over the stock performance for no extra charge.

Next I decided to see how the board scaled when just trying to clock it myself.  So I started by leaving everything on auto and upping the Bclk directly through Bios.

I was very surprised as the board went to 200 Bclk with everything on auto with the exception of setting up the ram correctly.  Not only did the board start but ran almost completely stable Passed Linx testing 4 out of 5 passes.

That speaks extremely well for the board as it can automatically set these settings and get the board to such a level of stability with basically no user intervention.  With a little voltage tweaking I was able to get the board running 24/7 stable at 4 ghz  200×20 stable with a ram speed of 1600 mhz CAS7 which returned very remarkable results.

One strange thing I did run into is that the board occasionally would have a strange post cycling and list a failed overclock once posted  on a 24/7 stable overclock.

Benchmark testing

To start off with we run them at stock (all stock runs of each bench on left side)

Wprime is basically a multithreaded number crunching bench…it gives us a chance to test all 8 threads of the CPU. On the right is the overclocked run of the exact same test. You will notice how large of a difference that made, so imagine how much difference it would make when encoding a video or any other normal application.

Now on to 3dmark vantage. On the left is a stock single card run. Once more on the right is the overclocked single card run. Notably, not a large increase as only the cpu score went up,but the graphics score is largely unaffected,…Lets see if the bottleneck is the single card?

There we have it, this processor/motherboard combo is very efficient, so that leads to the graphics cards being a huge bottleneck,  and adding the second card increased the score amazingly.

Gaming overclock testing

These tests are to show how well the board scales in real life gaming situations. Both single GPU and dual/SLI configurations. The games used are Crysis and Cryostasis. Both games are fairly new with very intensive graphics engines.

First up on the left is Cryostasis single card, followed on the right by Cryostasis in SLI. As you can see the cards one again scale beautifully together and make for a very good performance and frame-rate jump.

Next up is CRYSIS!  This game is very system intensive and still very difficult to get playable frame-rates in large resolutions without a “state of the art” system.

Once again on the left is the single card run: Not bad considering that this is just a single super overclocked GTX260. But here is the result on the right with 2 cards in SLI: As you see the games scaled very well in SLI.     But one thing to note, on games so graphically demanding, I saw almost no increase (not even 1 FPS difference between 2.66ghz stock CPU and 4ghz overclocked CPU). Once again this CPU/motherboard combo apparently work very efficiently together, and quickly rendered the single GPU as a bottleneck.

“EASYTUNE” Utility

For anyone not aware, many motherboard manufacturers have been bundling software utilities that not only monitor health of the hardware but now also assist with some level of software overclocking past whats available in the bios.

The software included by Gigabyte is labeled “EASYTUNE” and it represents exactly what the tool does, making it very easy to tune and monitor your system from one easy “hassle free” utility. I included some screenshots of the overclocking features to help demonstrate what features are offered by this utility.

+Temperature, voltage, and fan speed monitoring

+Graphics card monitoring

+Memory settings and memory SPD information

+CPU information, along with motherboard details.

+A full overclocking section with frequency and voltage settings for most setting,…most can be changed actively without ever leaving the OS.

Conclusion and final thoughts

The board was very impressive, and I must say it did live up to the expectations I have for a Gigabyte board. Not only did it live up to those but it smashed through them, and set a new record for me as for the ease of overclock and ease of usability.

Aside from the issue with tri SLI needing 8 expansion slots, the board is amazing and very powerful.  Anyone looking to build a great gaming rig that also has all of the power features to allow for lower heat dissipation but also a much nicer power bill when doing standard desktop tasks,  this would be an excellent choice for you.

In Review;

+Excellent bios.

+Great chipset cooling

+Lots of onboard options

+Excellent board layout

And on the downside;

-Needs 8 expansion slots in case to run Tri SLI

-occasional strange post cycle on cold boot on a 24/7 stable overclock.

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Review written and photographed by Shannon/Punx223
Edited and submitted by Romdominance