So, an exciting new thing came in the mail today. We have our second P-55
board, the P-55 UD4P. This is an ATX
sort of uh mainstream gaming platform board from Gigabyte. You can see it
features ultra durable 3, which basically ensures that you're going to
have good power delivery when you're overclocking or gaming or doing whatever
it is you do with a reasonably high-end board. Now, speaking of reasonably
high-end board, this is an 1156 board. So, that means it's got support for the
upcoming Core i5 and the new socket 1156
Core i7. So, let's get into the accessories. We've got an IDE cable,
four SATA cables, comes in a little package like that. Then, we have a uh
Dolby home theater sticker. So, there's some kind of Dolby certification going
along with this board. Uh flexible SLI bridge, so it has SLI support. Then,
we've got an installation guide book for installing your motherboard, the regular
users manual, and we've got a driver CD
included in the front cover of that. Then, you've got your IO shield. Then
you've got a manual for smart 6 gigabytes monitoring software. Then
you've got a manual for smart TPM, some kind of
um okay, some Bluetooth cell phone.
Okay, we'll get to that later. Uh then let's get down to the uh the more
interesting parts. We've got the Gigabyte P45 UD4P. So let's pull this
board out of the packaging here and have a closer look at it. So, like most P-55
boards, we've got support for up to 16
gigs of dual channel DDR3 memory. You've got an 1156 LG 1156 socket. And then
you've got an 8phase power distribution
system for the CPU itself surrounded by these uh pretty cool looking coolers.
Now, this is a bit of a departure from Gigabyte normal color scheme in that
there's only like three colors. So, we've got the dark blue PCB, very
characteristic. Then we've got white ports, blue ports, and that's about it.
We've got SATA 2. You've got your power connectors in the usual spots. We've got
an IDE connector. We've got a floppy connector. And here's some of the more
interesting stuff. We've got support for two 16x cards in SLI, but each of them
gets 8x bandwidth. So SLI or Crossfire
can both plug into those things. And let's have a look at the IO ports here.
So, if I can get you to have a look. Okay, so we've got 10 USB ports. Total
of 10 USB ports, but two of them are these cool
USB/ESATA ports. That's really neat. So, you can plug in either an ESATA hard
drive or a USB device. You've got FireWire, digital audio, a couple
Ethernet ports, and seven channel audio.
So, there it is. The EP 55, oh, sorry,
EP, the P-55 UD4P.