Gigabyte's GA-P55-UD4P motherboard
Sensibly stacked

With a street price hovering around $250, the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 we looked at during our P55 launch coverage is decidedly not a mid-range motherboard. The $170 GA-P55-UD4P is certainly more reasonably priced, even if it does run $20 more than Asus' P7P55D. Fortunately, the extra $20 hasn't been frittered away on gaudy lighting effects, questionable accessories, or other wasteful avenues. Instead, Gigabyte has beefed up the UD4P's hardware, which ultimately makes for a more versatile board.

Like the P7P55D, however, the board itself isn't quite as fancy as more indulgent models. There are only four board layers, down from eight on the UD6. Gigabyte still squeezes in two-ounce copper layers, though. It also litters the board with high-quality electrical components, such as ferrite-core chokes, low RDS(on) MOSFETs, and solid-state capacitors.

Just looking at the UD4P, you might think the board had traditional north and south bridge chipset components. The P55 PCH is actually in the lower right-hand corner, as we just saw with the P7P55D. What looks like a north bridge cooler is acting as an additional heatsink for the board's power regulation circuitry. This extra chunk of aluminum crowds the layout a little, and it could conflict with larger aftermarket heatsinks that fan out from the socket. So could the DIMM slots, which are quite close to the socket.

Gigabyte has a good thing going with its new toned-down approach to color palettes. The trademark turquoisey blue board works well with the white and light blue accents and darker heatsinks. However, none of the four sets of "racing stripes" actually match, let alone point in a consistent direction. A couple of white stripes down the middle of the board would look much racier, I think.

The UD4P has eight power phases running to the processor, which is fewer than the less expensive Asus board. I wouldn't spend too much time counting phases, though. MSI's mid-range P55-GD65 is a six-phase design, yet it easily overclocked to a 200MHz base clock speed and auto-piloted a Core i5-750 to 3.34GHz on just 1.352V. One doesn't necessarily need loads of power phases, even when engaged in spirited overclocking.

Since you won't need all eight phases while idling or even performing basic tasks, the Gigabyte board dynamically scales the number in use. However, unlike the P7P55D, there's no apparent provision to juggle lower loads between different phase blocks.

Edge-mounted SATA connectors make an appearance on the UD4P. They're set back a little, too, which provides just a smidgen of extra clearance for hard drive cages that might be in close proximity in smaller enclosures. At least none of the eight ports will be obscured by longer graphics cards. The low-profile PCH cooler shouldn't be a problem, either.

Gigabyte manages to squeeze in seven expansion slots, but the top x1 is of dubious value. Right behind it sits the board's hood ornament auxiliary power circuitry heatsink, limiting compatibility with longer cards. Shorter ones, too: my stubby PCIe x1 Gigabit Ethernet card won't even fit into the slot.

The UD4P's pair of PCIe x16 slots is far more promising. Both stem from the Lynnfield CPU, which means you get either a full 16 lanes of bandwidth to one slot or eight lanes to each of them. CrossFire support is a given, of course, and this board is also SLI-certified.

One could easily be forgiven for mistaking the UD4P's port cluster for one from an extravagant, high-end unit. The spread is deliciously packed with goodness, including pairs of S/PDIF outputs, FireWire connectors, GigE jacks, and eSATA ports. Those external Serial ATA ports don't have built-in USB power, which is a shame, but the port cluster does have a whopping ten standard USB ports.

I'm not a huge fan of integrated motherboard audio, but I have to give Gigabyte props for using Realtek's ALC889A codec. It's the only codec that can do on-the-fly Dolby Digital Live encoding, which is great for anyone with a compatible receiver or speakers. We'll see how the ALC889A and UD4P fare when we measure analog audio signal quality in a moment.

Although they use very different interfaces and even different color schemes, the Asus and Gigabyte BIOSes we've seen on this first batch of P55 motherboards have been nearly equivalent in terms of their overclocking and tweaking options, overall feature sets, and general usability. You can tease out little differences here and there, such as Gigabyte's nifty settings summary screen and its support for per-channel memory timings, but it's really hard to find fault with either's approach. That is until we get to automatic fan speed control, which amounts to an on/off switch for only the UD4P's processor fan. I know I gripe about this a lot, but it's ridiculous; a BIOS that offers millivolt granularity for a whopping eight different system voltages shouldn't be saddled with stone-age fan speed controls.

At least Gigabyte has BIOS backups covered. The UD4P's secondary BIOS chip can be a real life-saver should you corrupt the original with a bad flash or some other disaster.