so we finally got our last Gigabyte p55
unboxing this is the p55 ud5 so this is
their step down from the ultra premium ud6 so we're gonna have support for a
lot of the high-end features of the ud6 but it'll be cut down in a couple small
ways so it features 12 phase power compared to the 24 phase power on the
ud6 but we still got a lot of high-end stuff like sli crossfire x and obviously
support for gigabytes ultra durable 3 technology and smart 6 which is a
variety of different ways of smartly managing your system
which i finally looked up most of the time i don't run those sort of
bundled motherboard utilities anyway though so anyway okay let's get this board open so
here we go accessory package we have again quite a complete accessory package
so we've got four SATA ports one eye cables one ide cable then we've got a
flexible sli bridge we've got your smart 6 user guide your smart trusted platform
module guide we've got the regular motherboard user manual along with a
drivers and utilities dvd then we've got the multilingual
installation guide book so that's your quick start guide then here we've got
two e SATA ports and one molex port
i o bracket adapter thingy then we've got two molex to SATA power adapters and
then two SATA to esata cable so that
allows you to take a couple of just regular joe hard drives with no special
enclosures and plug them directly off the back of your computer to use any
SATA mode so then we've got our i o shield
dolby home theater sticker a Gigabyte system sticker
and let's get down to the board there's actually like a foam padding thing here
that's kind of neat i guess it protects the uh protects the northbridge heatsink
okay so let's get this baby open and have a look so like i mentioned before
we've got a 12 phase power design on this board 12 phases for the CPU itself
and then two phases for the uncore so they're really really serious about
providing a lot of power phases to every component of your system here all right
so let's have a look at the general layout of this board it's actually quite
similar to the ud6 so we've got our socket 1156 right where it belongs your
12 phase power is right here all around the CPU socket then you've got quite a
robust cooling solution for the whole board so from the
south bridge northbridge and mosfet areas are all adequately cooled with
kind of a funky funky uh design going on on the sides of all of
them that's kind of neat so your power connectors are right where they belong
with the 8 pin up at the top left and the 24 pin over on the right
and you've got dual channel ddr3 memory like all p55 boards now that's one
feature again that is missing from the ud6 when you step down to the ud5 is you
don't have those extra two memory slots okay so let's have a look
at the PCIe layout so this is a PCIe 16x
slot and this is a PCIe 16x physical but
8x electrical now both of these can be run in 8x 8x mode for sli or crossfire
this one down at the bottom is only a 4x slot and it runs off the chipset so you
can't use it for sli or crossfire functionality so we've got onboard clear
cmos on board power and reset switches
here and then we've got our 10 10
SATA ii ports on the back and now let's just have a look at the back io so here
we go we've got a ps2 mouse keyboard combo port then we've got one two three
four five six ten usb ports two of which
are usb esata combo ports i really like to see those those are cool then we've
got digital audio out firewire we have
two gigabit ethernets and then we have 7.1 audio and oh yeah we've got power
circuitry on the back but not quite as much as on the ud6 so thank you for
checking out the p55 ud5 from Gigabyte