Gadgetory

so an exciting new thing came in the mail today we have our second p55 board the p55 you d4p this is an ATX out of a mainstream gaming platform board from gigabyte you can see it features ultra durable three which basically ensures that you're gonna 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 on 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 for SATA cables and then some little package like that then we have a Dolby home theater sticker so there's some kind of Dolby certification going along with this board flexible SLI bridge so it has SLI support then we've got an installation guidebook for installing your motherboard the regular users manual and you've got a driver CD included in the front cover of that then you've got your i/o shield then you've got a manual for smart six gigabytes monitoring software then you've got a manual for smart GPM some kind of okay some Bluetooth cellphone okay we'll get to that later then let's get down to the the more interesting parts we've got the gigabyte G 45 UD four piece so let's pull this board out of the packaging here and have a closer look at it so like most piece we've got support for up to 16 gigs of dual-channel ddr3 memory you've got an 11 56 LGA 1156 socket and then you've got an eight phase-- power distribution system for the CPU itself surrounded by these pretty cool-looking coolers now this is a bit of a departure from gigabytes 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 I'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 2 16 X cards in SLI but each of them gets X bandwidth so SLI or crossfire can both plug into those things and let's have a look at the i/o ports here so it should 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 sorry piece it the p55 you d4p