so today on my video blog I'm going to be having a look at yet another one of
gigabytes new lineup of p55a
motherboards now the key Improvement that they've made with the p55a series
is that it features their 333 onboard acceleration that means they've got USB
3.0 power 3x which means that all of the
USB ports are able to provide three times the specified amount of power and
it also has SATA 3.0 or SATA 3 which is
actually SATA 6 GB per second in terms
of speed now let's just clear some junk
out of the way and let's get this board open as with all of their um recent
boards recent high-end boards it does feature Ultra durable 3 which is their
two times uh 2 oz copper PCB now let's
just have a quick look at the accessories we've got the io Shield okay
we've got an IDE cable and two sta cables then we have the manual as well
as an installation CD for the drivers
the smart 6 users manual as well as the multilingual installation guide book
then we have a paper divider in the middle and an anti-static bag featuring
the ud3 motherboard now the ud3 is the lowest end out of the p55a boards that
are on the market right now but it does still have most of the key features the
big one that's missing is SLI support so
although you can see we've got an ATI Crossfire X logo here you do do not have
support for SLI in these PCI Express
ports now let's go around and do a quick rundown of the board itself so you've
got your CPU socket in the middle you've got what appears to
be well it looks like four or six phase
power I can't tell but I'm just going to keep rolling with this then we've got
our mosfet heat sinks which are up here okay we've got support for the usual
four dims of DDR3 memory the power plugs
are in there ideal locations with the eight pin up at the top left and the 24
pin over on the right hand Edge okay now in terms of SATA this is where this
board starts to get interesting because you can see here we've got six SATA 2
ports and these are running off of the Intel chipset and then right here
running off this Marvel chipset right here we've got two SATA 3 ports so for a
total of eight SATA ports and these ones are running at 6 gbit per second so
that's really going to start to make a difference with the new generation ssds
that are going to be coming down the pipe although we do have the Barracuda
XT already available which is a 6 gabit
per second compatible magnetic hard drive okay so before we wrap this up I
just wanted to have a quick look at the io panel so first of all you've got one
of those PS2 combo ports I love these they'll accept either a USB or a
keyboard a USB or a keyboard a mouse or a keyboard then we have 1 2 3 eight USB
2.0 ports we've got our digital audio and then these blue ports down here are
USB 3.0 so that runs at 5 gbit per
second much much faster than the old USB
2.0 standard I mean with these you'll be able to max out any current hard drive
in terms of sustained reads and rights without worrying about any kind of
bottlenecking very cool then we've got a gigabit landport as well as a 7.1 audio
out so thank you for checking out my unboxing and quick overview of the
Gigabyte p55a ud3