GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD4P (rev. 1.0) Pro Reviews

We all knew that most P55 based motherboards all perform almost identical to one another. What separates one manufacturer from the other is features, what comes with the motherboard. In GIGABYTE's case this motherboard the P55A-UD4P comes with SATA III, USB Power III, and USB III. Now as most of you already know that by utilizing the full bandwidth of SATA III (Turbo) our PCI-E video card expansion ports will be reduced from a 16x X 1 (x8 X 2 for mutli GPU configurations) to an single x8 PCI-E lane rendering the second PCI-E utterly useless, because the SATA III controller is borrowing the extra 8 PCI-E lanes. Now my problem is this, do I nail the P55A-UD4P to a proverbial cross because of this issue? Or do I overlook it? Things that make me go hmm.

If you were waiting for the second generation of motherboards based on Intel's P55 Express chipset to show up, wait no longer. The Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4P board combines some cutting edge features (repeat after me USB 3!) with excellent stability and build quality, and at $210 CDN ($190 USD, £125 GBP) it's got the value nailed down too. Recommended.

As far as overclocking goes both boards were great at it. Both boards were able to bring my i5 750 above 4GHz, and the dual BIOS greatly aided in this conquest. I was very surprised to see the P55A-UD4P actually overclock higher then the UD6. Not only that, but a full 200MHz higher. When the boards were overclocked, we saw some pretty big performance increases, which is always good. In the end, I'd reccomend these boards to anyone who wants to spend the money. That being said, unless you want to use three videocards, you may he happier with the UD4P. It's slightly cheaper, overclocks a little bit better, and offer you more then you need!