**Official** GIGABYTE 333 Onboard Acceleration P55A Series - P55A-UD6/UD4P/UD3

[stasio]

Nope mate,links are still in this thread.

New BIOS released:
http://forums.tweaktown.com/f69/giga...st-bios-28441/

[stasio]

BIOS out:

GA-P55-UD3P - F6a
GA-P55M-UD2 - F6

[lasty]

Review spotted for the P55A-UD4P;

http://techgage.com/article/gigabyte_p55a-ud4p/1

[Temujin]

Thanks, lasty. It's been added to the first post. Now, to hunt down some USB 3.0 devices to validate the board. Some product launch press releases came out, but it seems nothing physical will hit the shelves till next month at the earliest. :/

[sno.lcn]

Received my P55A-UD6 over the weekend, and I'm beginning testing now. I'll also have a review up asap

[stasio]

BIOS out:

GA-P55A-UD4 - F6
GA-P55A-UD4P - F6
GA-P55-UD6 - F7b
GA-P55-UD4 - F5
GA-P55-UD4P - F6
GA-P55M-UD4 - F6
released 03.Dec 09

[NotSoCoolJ]

OOPs, your right, man I meant to post this in the i5 OC thread. I must have gotten turned around. I noticed that there was a lot of talk about the p55a-xxx here lol. My density knows no bounds. Carry on.

[-n7-]

Well, this thread title says it's for the "A" boards, which are the new ones w/ USB3/SATA3.

Far more people own the non-A boards, we're just not posting in this thread.

Here's the i5 OCing thread; lots of people with your board in there, including me.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=235075

My OC:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...&postcount=205

[boostedevo]

Got a P55A-UD6 this week, finally had some time to play with it this weekend. Solid board so far I dusted off an HD4850 CF setup to test out in the board and while I wasn't too excited about using the old cards, either they aren't as horrible as I thought they were or 1156 just makes them a lot better Either way, I ran some benches on it this weekend and figured I'd share...

WCing on the proc, stock 4850s with single-slot coolers using CCC for OC.







Yeah, I forgot to change the mem timings for this 32M





I didn't have too much time, but I decided to drop the SS on real quick (which seems to be getting weaker by the day). This proc has real big diminishing returns >4.9GHz cold or not, high Vc or not, so I just took it easy on the SS and CPU and did some quick, light benches at low Vc







For the record, I was using F5 BIOS that it came with. 220BCLK is about max on ambient cooling (same as every other board I've tried this proc in). On the SS, I to got it up to 235BCLK easily, but didn't try very hard for more. The proc hasn't gone past 240BCLK in any board, so it's almost guaranteed the same here.

As I have more time, I'll put a little more effort into the benches, but it's off to a good start

[Hardc0r3]

i've been waiting for a while for this thread, please help me with an answer, does anyone who uses p55a-ud4 or ud4p onboard sound realtek alc889a on analog 5.1 mode on the realtek console manager have rear speakers or side speakers active in this configuration?

[Temujin]

i've been waiting for a while for this thread, please help me with an answer, does anyone who uses p55a-ud4 or ud4p onboard sound realtek alc889a on analog 5.1 mode on the realtek console manager have rear speakers or side speakers active in this configuration?

I had various 5.1 speakers set up on many an ALC889A. Are you having problems with your's or something?

I can easily discern the differences between the 889 and 889A Codecs since I run many full ranged audio and video benchmarks. Full range video games benefit as well.

[Temujin]

I've updated the post with some Review links slowly coming in from the battlefield. We should soon see some USB 3.0 benchmarks as the devices go out to reviewers. Many of us are still waiting for a more polished, ready device. *Wink*

[Hardc0r3]

I had various 5.1 speakers set up on many an ALC889A. Are you having problems with your's or something?

I can easily discern the differences between the 889 and 889A Codecs since I run many full ranged audio and video benchmarks. Full range video games benefit as well.

I've had a gigabyte ep45-ud3p v1.0 with alc889a where when i chose a 5.1 channel speaker configuration on the realtek sound manager with the latest drivers installed i had side speakers active and no rears. My brother owns a ga p35-ds3r with the same alc889a and he doesn't have this issue , he has rears when choosing 5.1 config not sides, so thats why i wanna know if ga p55a-ud4 has this issue or not( i wanna buy it but i need this issue cleared first) It was the same no mather which SO i installed for my ep45-ud3p
In the atachment u will find my brothers ga p35 ds3r realtek manager and with red markings is how it was on my ga ep45-ud3p

[Temujin]

Trouble shooting these type of issues can be frustrating. Are you and your brother using the same Windows operating system? The speaker package should theoretically be just fine. However, some can give you a headache due to their design. I assume you've tried different drivers just in case to rule out any OS bugs.

Otherwise, I haven't encountered any issues here using some basic Creative and Altec 5.1 speaker packages on the P55 or P55A motherboards that have the ALC889A Codec.

[Hardc0r3]

Trouble shooting these type of issues can be frustrating. Are you and your brother using the same Windows operating system? The speaker package should theoretically be just fine. However, some can give you a headache due to their design. I assume you've tried different drivers just in case to rule out any OS bugs.

Otherwise, I haven't encountered any issues here using some basic Creative and Altec 5.1 speaker packages on the P55 or P55A motherboards that have the ALC889A Codec.

yes i've tried everything, around 6 driver versions, and it was the same on win xp sp3, vista x64 sp 2 and windows 7 x64 , i ve even bought the creative x-fi mb for this board (still no change), something for a guy living in Romania is kind of hard cause u just can't ( my country isn't listed when you try to buy the x-fi mb activation code and after mailing their support team they answered that this fact won't change in the near future). I have a logitech g51 sound system.
Ok i will buy this board hopefully i will not have this issue
Why does this issue bother me?? cause most of the sound codecs don't know about sides, they send the signal to the rears in 5.1 config, so u can imagine how nice is that, otherwise i would just plug my rears on the sides imput and get over it.

[Temujin]

The drivers you both are using are probably very similar if not exactly the same. Try configuring your software exactly the way he has and see what happens. It could be the speakers aren't playing well if they're tandem, but I doubt it. It sounds more like a configuration issue. The last resort is that the integrated audio chip is having issues.

If I read your post right, you tried using a discrete X-Fi audio card. If that didn't work, then it definitely narrows it down to an incorrect software setting and/or speakers not compatible with 5.1 for some odd reason.

[Hardc0r3]

The drivers you both are using are probably very similar if not exactly the same. Try configuring your software exactly the way he has and see what happens. It could be the speakers aren't playing well if they're tandem, but I doubt it. It sounds more like a configuration issue. The last resort is that the integrated audio chip is having issues.

If I read your post right, you tried using a discrete X-Fi audio card. If that didn't work, then it definitely narrows it down to an incorrect software setting and/or speakers not compatible with 5.1 for some odd reason.

Neah is not a card is just a software from creative for onboard realtek alc 889a owners to act like an X-fi , u got it on youre motherboard driver cd or u can download it on gigabyte webpage and it's only for 30 days.
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/FileList/...090106_xfi.htm
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/M...ta+x86+(32-bit)

[Temujin]

Ok, I understand now. Yeah, I've seen those downloads available for some of the boards. I was under the impression that an X-Fi capable board will have the aluminum little X-Fi tag on the audio chip like on some of the other brand boards.

One thing also nice about upgrading to the P55/P55A boards is that the LGA1156 processors are much quicker than the LGA775 series. You should be able to find some pretty good deals.

[irev210]

anyone else get a nice buzzing noise from the VRM area? Under load mine is LOUD

Thinking I just got a bad board... can anyone comment?

[Hardc0r3]

does anyone know if ga p55a-ud4 has both sli bridge and crossfire bridge conectors included?

[euxinus]

I can’t get my p55a-ud3r to post. It gives me several short beeps in a row and a long beep at the end and restarts. If I remove the RAM it doesn’t give out the long beep at the end but continuous with the short ones but with pauses and it doesn’t proceed to shut down as before.
My zalman zm600-hp won’t boot the board at all, my corsair vx450w does though.

Things I have done:
Tested the PSU and graphic card in another pc with no problems.
I tried both PCIe slots. Tested with another graphic card.
Tried 4 sticks of RAM in different slots.
Cleared the CMOS by removing the battery and later on I tried the Clear CMOS jumper.
Checked the socket, reseated the CPU- several times.
Put it inside a case and then outside on the cardboard box.
Tried it in another wall socket in another room.

Things I have not done:
Tested the CPU on another board (don’t have one)
Tested another CPU on this board (don’t have one)
Tested the RAM on another board (don’t have one)

Specs: Xeon x3440, Gigabyte p55a-ud3r, 8800gts 320mb + ati x1900gt (not at the same time), 4x1gb 1.5v A-data with hynix chips, Corsair vx450 + Zalman zm600-hp

Any ideas?
Should I RMA? I’m not sure if it’s the CPU or motherboard, but it’s probably the motherboard? I know that the x3440 isn’t on the supported CPU list, but I have read that other people have not had problems with it, including gigabyte boards.

[lasty]

does anyone know if ga p55a-ud4 has both sli bridge and crossfire bridge conectors included?

Mine only came with an SLI bridge included.

[Buckeye]

Had a chance to bench a 870 ES CPU on the P55A-UD6, was not a whole lot better than the 860 ES. As I compared this 870 ES to other retails I can see this chip requires a fair amount more of vcore as the OC is upped and still does not like extreme cold very much.

All of this was done on SS Phase and as I got to around 4.6ghz it was really stressing the Phase unit because of the vcore need to boot and run benches.

Cascade operation was just to painful as it seems to CB not to far past what Ss Phase could do so I would have to shut down the 2nd stage to get it to boot, then fire it back up and heaven help you if you had crash and had to reboot. While I was at -100c it really didn't seem to help much and this chip was very unstable so I stopped Cascade operations.

If this seemed like a good chip I would have gotten some DICE but I didn't think it was worth the cost of DICE to even mess with this CPU.

So here are some screens of how it all went down, starting at 4.0ghz and going as high as it would take me.

4.0ghz 2D runs


4.0ghz 3D runs with 2x 260gtx's in SLI


4.4ghz 2D runs


4.4ghz 3D runs 2x 260gtx's in SLI


4.6ghz 2D runs


4.8ghz 2D runs


Final notes:
I compared my results with the AnandTech results seen here
http://www.anandtech.com/GalleryImage.aspx?id=7111

I see that they are usin a few different RAM timings than I have so I will try and see if I can get the ones they used on mine and what the results might be. They do not seem to show there RAM speed tho. I did take mine up to 2000mhz but it did not seem to help so I went for tighter RAM timings which did help me out. My chip would simply not boot at the vcore they showed

[Temujin]

I haven't seen too many folks breaking the 5GHz barrier with the i7 860 or 870 unless it was a "nice" chip. Do you only have 1600MHz DDR3 memory on hand? Or, are you just using it while pushing the CPU to its limits?

Not sure my extra cooled liquid cooling system can quite get my 870 there or not. Still, 4 to 4.3GHz for the regular folks who don't get too extreme is a pretty nice performance gain. One of these days, I'll get a hold of some decent Phase cooling.

[Buckeye]

Yeah I am not sure what is going on with these CPU's I have tried. I see boostedevo above was hitting 5ghz with 1.5vcore, mine would not even boot unless I was close to 1.7vcore which was just to much load for SS Phase.

Sometime wrong with the ES CPU's or board, I dont know, maybe its just me.

I did get a Dominator GT 2000mhz RAM kit were I could really tighten up the RAM timings and thats what I used on these last runs, but getting to 2000mhz was not easy, where as on my other Dominator 1600mhz kits I could get to 2000mhz easy but could not get the RAM very tight.

So in the end of all this I am scratching my head going crappy ES CPU's or something wrong with the board, I don't know. The more I see what others are doing I am begging to think something is up with the MB as 2 ES CPU's now are doing pretty much the same thing.