Reviews - Pro-Clockers! PC Reviews One MegaHertz At A Time

As you probably know, Gigabyte is now primarily focused on the LGA1156 platform. It is no coincidence that the company offers a lot of such motherboards. There are 22 products on the P55 chipset alone. Another 7 are based on FDI-enabled chipsets, making use of graphics cores integrated into dual-core processors  for this platform. Obviously, the latter series is primarily aimed at low and mid-end markets. While the abundance of motherboards based on the high-end chipset is created by both older P55 series and newer P55A series (with SATA 6Gb/s and USB 3.0 support). Note that the company updated its product line considerably, having fixed a number of issues, both real and imaginary. For example, the platform has often been criticized for being able to support just two graphics cards in a x8+x8 configuration. But you shouldn't forget that only a minority of users have two graphics cards, and not many of those have high-end models for which x8+x8 is not enough. Anyway, Gigabyte considered these complaints as well. Thanks to the NVIDIA nForce 200 SLI processor, the top-class P55A-UD7, has four PCIe x16 slots which can be used as x16+x16, x16+x8+x8 or x8+x8+x8+x8, depending on how many graphics cards you have. Note that all of the long slots use CPU's PCIe lanes, so the chipset lanes are allocated to the only PCIe x1 slots (the 5th already) and a bunch of peripheral controllers. In other words, the use of nForce 200 solved the issue of insufficient PCIe lanes typical for models of the older series. As a result, P55A-UD6, unlike its predecessor, has ceased to be the highest-end motherboard in the series, but it offers both advanced features and reasonable design updates. In general, the newer motherboard won't be criticized as much, though it still belongs to the top-end segment where users are quite hard to please.

 

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