Gigabyte P67A-UD5 P67 LGA1155 Sandy Bridge SLI Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,660 words · ~8 min read
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today we're going to be unboxing the p67a ud5 this is a core i7 core i5
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compatible but this motherboard is only compatible with
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generation 2 chips on socket 1155 so it features the
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Intel p67 chipset and it also features some Gigabyte innovations such as
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delivering maximum CPU power so what maximum CPU power means is that if you
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can provide the cooling for it you can provide the power to get the maximum
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overclock out of your CPU so this board even though it's not their top tier
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board they do have a ud7 board as well
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it features 20 phase power
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which is far more than i've seen on ud5 level boards in the past it also
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features other Gigabyte innovations such as their ultra durable 3 which is their
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thicker copper pcb as well as their 333
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acceleration which means it's got usb 3 SATA 36 gigabit per second as well as
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their usb power 3x this is one that i'm personally very fond of because it
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allows you to use a hub plug in as many as three fully powered usb devices and
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still not run out of power last but not least they've got their on off charge
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which allows you to charge devices even while the system is powered off you've
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got their dual BIOS technology which makes it pretty much impossible to
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corrupt your BIOS and not be able to recover it so let's go ahead and get
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this board opened up it has a three year warranty
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in the us and canada and i'm actually not sure what the warranty is elsewhere
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in the world so you'll have to kind of research that one on your own we have a
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dolby home theater sticker inside first of all and next we have the i o shield
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which is conveniently color coded so here's a hint right now we already know
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that we're gonna have uh four usb 3.0
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ports on the back panel we have some Gigabyte
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colored the traditional blue um SATA cables so we have two straight
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and two right angle this this is really important warning socket 1155 is not the
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same as 1156 you cannot plug an 1156
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chip into an 1155 board you will damage either the board or the chip or both
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here's your utility dvd don't use this download the latest off the Gigabyte
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website as well as a user's manual which i think you can also download off the
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Gigabyte website but not necessary here's a multilingual installation
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guidebook where they give you some basics on how to install components in
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your board really though if you want to know how to
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build a system i probably wouldn't stick to just that little guide i would
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actually look up my system building guide on my ncixcom channel
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and i actually walk you through every step i know it's a half hour long video
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but it's still very helpful here's an sli bridge
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which tells us that this board even though it wasn't anywhere on the outside
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of the box actually supports not only sli but also crossfire x so this is a
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fully
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dual pci express compatible board
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and while it does have three PCIe 16x
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slots and it probably will work in a three-way configuration bear in mind
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that there's only so many pci-e lanes on
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the p-67a chipset so you know what i'll get into that a little bit more once
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we're looking at the PCIe lanes why don't we look at the overall layout of the board first of all matte black pcb
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love it this is a great move from Gigabyte it looks phenomenal it's great
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whether you have don't have a system window because then what do you care or
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if you do have a system window it looks really good especially if you're using
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like lights because a matte black pcb won't reflect and glare off of it it'll
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just look really dark and you'll be able to light up the things that you want to
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see which is usually not your motherboard mind you with a board like
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this i might want to see it so the cameraman's having a look at the 20 phase power right now as well as the
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cooling on the vrm as well as the chipset so we have heat pipes connecting
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all those different coolers we have our socket right here in the middle as i
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said before this is an lga 1155 socket so you got support for the ever popular
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core i5 2500k as well as the i7 2600k
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anything on an 1155 socket will work in here but bear in mind this is a p67
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board so that means there are no display
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outputs on the back so you will not have support for onboard video you will have
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to add a dedicated graphics card in terms of power we've got our 8 pin
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connector up here in the top left exactly where it belongs as well as our
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24 pin connector over here on the right also exactly where it belongs p67 all
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these boards are going to have full support for dual channel ddr3 memory and
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there's those logos we were missing on the front of the board crossfire x as well as sli so yes they are fully
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supported i'm not making things up down here on the side of the board we have
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some fluff and then we also have four SATA two three gigabit per second ports
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as well as two SATA three six gigabit
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per second ports so these are actually running off of the Intel chipset now
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which is uh a pretty big improvement and that makes me pretty happy next we have
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our front panel plugs we have two front panel usb ports we
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have wow two front panel usb 3.0 headers
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so that means this board supports a total of eight usb 3.0 ports very very
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cool then we have a firewire port as
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well as our front panel audio in its traditional Gigabyte location over here
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right behind the audio jacks so let's have a look at the slot layout we have
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two PCIe oh yeah it has onboard power thank you
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cameraman it also has an onboard reset switch as well as a clear cmos switch i
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love this location for these buttons because unlike the ones down at the very
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bottom edge of the board if you plug a graphics card in
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okay so let's say you have a graphics card here well these aren't covered you can
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actually you can actually access these so that's uh pretty cool the power uh
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power word is upside down i wonder if somebody uh wonder if somebody put that
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on wrong but i guess it doesn't really matter um you know what hey if you guys
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have a ud5 board please post a comment and let me know if
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your power switch is right side up or if yours is upside down like this one it
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won't affect the functionality since it's just shorting it out and it's not uh it doesn't matter the polarity but
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yeah it's pretty pretty interesting okay so we have two PCIe 1x slots two pci
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slots and three PCIe 16x slots but i
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want to tell you guys this one you can see right here you can actually
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see the wires is wired for full PCIe 16x
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this will run at 16x if you have one card installed this one right here you
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can clearly see is wired only for 8x this one is active as soon as you plug a
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card into it and that will reduce the available bandwidth to this guy to 8x so
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if you're running two cards you're going to be in 8x 8x mode this last one is
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actually only wired for PCIe 4x and so
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really a three-way graphics card configuration is not really optimal for
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this board i would probably use this for some other kind of expansion card like a
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raid card or yeah like an ocz revo drive
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would be a perfect example of what i would use this guy for so if you are
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running dual graphics available you will have one PCIe 1x slot one pci slot for
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any legacy devices as well as one PCIe 4x slot so let's move around to the back
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and have a look at the i o shield we have one of these legacy ps2 ports big
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fan of that actually i still like to see it we have one two three four five six usb
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2.0 ports and actually hold on hold on let me double check i can't tell yeah
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yeah okay so these are esata usb combo
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ports okay so that means we have two SATA ports two firewire optical as well
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as coaxial audio out and we have four
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usb 3.0 ports remember that's a total of eight gigabit Ethernet as well as 7.1
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audio out thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Gigabyte p67a ud5 lga
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1155 motherboard oh hey here's one more cool thing about this board look at that
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they used actual proper spring-loaded screws
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with with plastic washers to ensure that there's no issues with the uh with the
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hardware that they're using to fix all of these chipset coolers and whatnot i'm
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not a big fan of push pins love to see the little extra effort put in by
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Gigabyte on those kinds of fine finishing touches