Gadgetory

so today on my video blog I'm going to be having a look at yet another one of gigabytes new lineup of p55 a motherboards now the key improvement that they've made with the p55 a series is that it features their three three three 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 gigabits 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 recent boards recent high-end boards it does feature ultra durable 3 which is their 2 x 2 ounce copper PCB now let's just have a quick look at the accessories we've got the i/o shield okay we've got an IDE cable and two SATA cables then we have the manual as well as an installation CD for the drivers the smart six users manual as well as the multilingual installation guide book and we have a paper divider in the middle and an anti-static bag featuring two UD three motherboard now the UD 3 is the lowest end of the VP 55a 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 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 do-do-do-do-do well 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 a 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 say to to ports and these are running off of the Intel chipset and then right here running off this Marvell chipset right here we've got 2 SATA 3 ports so for a total of 8 SATA ports and these ones are running at 6 gigabit 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 gigabit per second compatible magnetic hard drive ok so before we wrap this up I just wanted to have a quick look at the i/o 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 8 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 gigabit 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 writes without worrying about any kind of bottlenecking very cool then we've got a Gigabit LAN port as well as a 7.1 audio out so thank you for checking out my unboxing and quick overview of the gigabyte p55 a UD 3