This section is going to be very brief. There are going to be a ton of reviews of this motherboard at all the major sites soon, not to mention you can already see the full specs for the GA-P55-UD4P at the Gigabyte web site right now. Basically, the P55-UD4P is a great representative of what the $150~$170USD P55 motherboard should possess as far as features go. Here is a basic run-down of the important ones...

• Support for an Intel® Core™ i7 / i5 series processor in the LGA1156 package
• 4 x Dual channel memory support for DDR3 2200/1333/1066/800 up to 16GB
• Realtek ALC889A codec
• 2 x RTL8111D chips (10/100/1000 Mbit) w/ Support for Teaming & Smart Dual LAN
• 1 x 16X PCI-E 2.0 @ 16X / 1 x 16X PCI-E 2.0 @ 8X / 3 x 1X PCI-E / 2 x PCI
• Total 8 x SATAII plus 2 x eSATA / 1 x IDE / 1 x Floppy
• 10 x USB 2.0 plus 4 x onboard headers
• Gigabyte dual BIOS

As we can see, this board really is fully featured and perfect for most any mainstream user. The rear eSATA ports actually play double duty and are USB 2.0 ports as well. Gigabyte also hasn't forgotten legacy IDE and floppy connections on this board. Overall, a nice mix of new and old give the P55-UD4P everything that everyone should be looking for in a mid range P55 motherboard. I still wish we had PS/2 connections for the mouse & keyboard but I think those days are long gone. At least the keyboard is still PS/2.


The most important specification for our benching purposes is the PCI-E slots. You can either run a single card in the top PCI-E 2.0 16X or two cards which would make both PCI-E 2.0 16X slots run at 8X. The motherboard supports both SLI and CrossFireX and the spacing of the two should be plenty, even for the monster MSI R4890 Cyclone OC's that I will be testing with.