Gigabyte P55M-UD4 Micro ATX review
Gigabyte P55M-UD4
Well this one is a little departure from what I am used to. This is a Micro ATX board, which I have never really worked with especially for a high performance system. The Micro ATX architecture have always been looked on by myself and many others as “basic” or “budget” boards, nothing you would build a serious gamer from.
Well with a quick look at this board I could tell it was designed from the ground up to be a good small form factor competitor.
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Once again, Thank you to gigabyte for giving me the opportunity to use this board to test and see just how well it will run.
To start off just overlooking the entire board, you can clearly see this board truly is TINY in every since of the word. The board with such small real estate still seems to fit all you would need on this board in such a small space. You will notice absent from this board is the standard Northbridge/southbridge combo. The board now has a P55 chipset which handles many of what would have been the I/O instructions the southbridge would have handled previously. The cpu now offers the 16 lanes of PCI-E bandwidth. This Does mean that you are limited to either a single 16x PCI-E 2.0 slot or two 8x PCI-E slots for your gpu's or other pci- express devices. For this micro board you will see you only have two 16x slots on the board, therefore up to two 8x cards.
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- small heatpipe cooler for the upper and left hand power phases.
- Low profile cooler allowed fitment of large tower cooler without any fitment issues.
- 8 serial ata ports one pair controlled by a add in Jmicron controller. Rear panel esata is a P55 driven port
- Onboard power and clear Cmos buttons for ease of use outside of the case.
- 14 total usb ports, 8 via rear panel and 6 via the onboard headers.
- 12 virtual Phase CPU power for ultimate stability when overclocking.
- rear panel ps2 dual use keyboard or mouse port.
this board for its size has a very amazing layout with limited space. Here are a few things I found as being issues.
- Power/reset/clear cmos buttons are basically not usable with a large dual slot cooled graphics card installed.
- reset and clear smos buttons are both very small and if you do remember which is which you can very easily clear your bios settings when intending to just restart the system.
- the inclusion of floppy and IDE connectors have forced one of the P55 sata ports to the inside of the location pointing away from the board and not over the edge like the other ports.
But all of that considered you must realize you are dealing with a Micro ATX board, it is very small and real estate is at a premium, so with that in mind I would say that the board layout is very nice, and easy to use.
Installation
Installation Was very easy, as I mounted it in a full tower, so it looked very tiny in there, I will be looking for a small lanbox or something of that nature to see how it all fits in there.
The board you will find like mentioned previously only has one ps/2 port which is universal for keyboard or mouse but you will need a usb version of one or the other. Once installing graphics cards I did find that the ram could not be removed or installed with the top upper most graphics card in place as the release levers will hit the card. Also with a large tower cooler it can be quite trying to get to the release lever for the top card, but you can reach under and feel it rather easily and release the card.
Bundled Accessories
access
with the 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
Bios Layout
Just like the EX58 I reviewed earlier, this bios is very similar, Mit at top and everything else ready to go from the first boot. Inside the mit you will see several submenus directly from the top.
- MIT current status
- Advanced frequency settings
- Advanced memory settings
- Advanced voltage settings
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Here is the main bios when you first enter MIT
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Here is the MIT current status (basically the speed everything is running at)
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Here you see the advanced frequency screen, this is where you would setup all of your basic and advanced cpu features and clock frequencies
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Here is where you find the advanced CPU features, including power save features and core/turbo enabling
The MIT was very easy to use and had a surprisingly small amount of voltage options that were clearly marked, which made overclocking quite easy on this board. There were only a couple voltages needed to get a decent overclock from it and rather quickly.
The memory settings you will find are well laid out and all collected together. With an SPD profile you will see the memory for the most part can be set automatically with very little intervention from you.
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Here is the advanced memory features where you can set pretty much every memory feature and timing setting for your ram
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Memory timing settings
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c2...223/P55/a9.jpg
Memory turnaround settings
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Voltages are easy to set and easy to work with as like many gigabyte boards I have found that the auto voltages allowed for a easy and safe moderate to very respectable overclock.
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Here you can see there is an extreme amount of available Vcore, I believe much more than you probably would ever use
Test setup
Motherboard: Gigabyte P55M-UD4
CPU: Core I7 860
Memory: Kingston DDR3 2000 Mhz Cas8 2x1gb
Hdd: Western digital 320 GB
Graphics card: Gigabyte GTX 260 Super overclock
CPU cooling: Promiliatech Megahalems with Skythe ultra kaze 3000RPM fan
PSU: FSP Everest 1010W
Getting started overclocking
I started by just bumping the Bclk first to see what it would do, and I found the board very willing to clock without an issue. Until I got up to 4.2-4.4ghz was when I started to see instability. After seeing what others have been able to do with the ES cpu's and that all seem to have an issue with overclocking I would say its not necessarily a board issue as much as just a bad sample.
I was very surprised being a micro board that this board scaled so well, appears to be just as capable as many of the high end boards.
This looks very well for this board as it is very compact form factor so as far as I can tell could make for a very good lanbox or portable gaming rig.
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:
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c2...223/P55/b3.jpg
and here is the overclocked run of the exact same test
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c2...223/P55/b4.jpg
Once again just like in the X58 review before you will see that the difference is huge, and that difference transfers straight over to real world performance difference. Anything from encoding your music for your ipod to converting a family video can all be made so much quicker with the simple overclock this board was able to accomplish.
Now on to 3dmark vantage
Here is a stock single card run.
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c2...223/P55/b5.jpg
and here is the overclocked single card run.
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c2...223/P55/B6.jpg
Once again you will notice not a huge increase as only the cpu score went up, but the graphics score is barely moved at all. I am betting this new architecture is just as efficient as the new X58 and allows the system to scale very well without a very high cpu clock speed.
Here is a run in SLI.
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c2...223/P55/b7.jpg
Like I figured you see a massive increase with the second card in place, the new architecture is very efficient and even at 8x you will see allows full bandwidth of the card, if your running dual gpu cards you may see a slight issue at this 8x bandwidth but from what I have seen the effect is marginal at worst.
Gaming overclock testing
These tests are to show how well the board scales in real life gaming situations. Both single GPU and SLI
The games used are Crysis and Resident Evil 5. Both games are fairly newer and with Gigabytes “Beat me if you dare” competition I figured the Resident Evil 5 benchmark would be fitting.
First up is Resident Evil single card:
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c2...223/P55/b8.jpg
Next up is Resident Evil SLI
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c2...223/P55/b9.jpg
You will notice that for some reason the Resident Evil 5 benchmark does not seem to scale with the sli cards. I will do a little more testing at a later date to find out why this is the case,.
Next test is Crysis, you will find that even todays newest setups can struggle to produce steady playable framerates at higher settings.
Here is the single card run:
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c2...223/P55/c1.jpg
A very decent result for a single Super Overclocked GTX260 on a micro ATX setup
But heres with 2 cards in SLI:
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c2...223/P55/c2.jpg
Well very similar to what was experienced with the X58 previously, the setups scaled very well from one card to 2, but I did see that from stock speed to overclocked speed the gaming was not really affected (maybe a few FPS at best) and that overclocking was not necessarily needed to game on this setup. However regular every day computing and speed was vastly improved by the mild overclock I was able to accomplish.
One amazing note was the average framerate of over 70FPS with these cards in sli. That I will say is truly astonishing.
BUNDLED SOFTWARE
With this Small board you do get some software that can pay big benefits. The boards already natively can be very efficient but they also include programs such as the “Smart 6” which allof for such features as
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- 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 I was truly amazed with. I must say that from such a small board, I expected standard performance, nothing really stand out. However from the board layout to the exceptional overclocking ability, to even the nice looking racing stripe design has all not only sold me, but also proven that a small form factor PC does not mean small performance.
This board with a little playing around with settings have allowed me to overclock into the 4.4ghz area on air, and score wprime results right up with the best and the best boards also.
If you are looking for a board to build anything from a homework machine, the SLI gaming rig, HTPC, or pretty much anything you would want a computer for this can fit all of your needs and then some. Granted if you need a lot of expansion slots then this is not the board for you. However if your looking to frag some friends with a killer high performance lanbox, this is the board for you, as it is small, but offers the big boy punch.
Pros:
- Excellent bios, very easy to work with
- very cool looking racing stripe cooler design
- Lots of onboard devices all somehow fit into such a small board
- Excellent board layout, very little compromised even in a small space
Cons:
- Onboard power/reset/clear cmos buttons not usable with installed dual slot card.
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