Gigabyte P55A-UD6
SATA and USB 3 are here!
The board we have here is the 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.
1394 is above the lowest 4x pci-e (Physx) slot can be possible issue depending upon placement of your 1394 header.
Bundled Accessories
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
- 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.
There will not be too much going into this as the bios is almost exactly the same as the P55micro, and very easy to visually see what each section does/
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:
and here is the overclocked run of the exact same test
Just like the previous P55 micro review you will see that it scaled pretty much the same and cpu 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 being raised.
Here is a stock single card Dual GPU run
And here 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.
The results I were quite surprised with. The board liked running very easily all the way up to 4.8ghz and 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 possabilities.
- 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.
Also I do believe with the advertised results and sata 3.0 ssd's and USB3.0 flash drives there are going to be a lot of reasont to want this board, and 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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Originally Posted by SubZero.it
But my benches were right next to the LN2 benches so i am pretty happy.... I just wish I had LN2 for this chip lol..
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