Gadgetory

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 UD 6 but we still go out a lot of high-end stuff like SLI crossfire X and obviously support 4 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 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 4 SATA ports one I 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 2 eSATA ports and 1 mol export IO bracket adapter thingy then we've got 2 molex to SATA power adapters and then 2 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 an eSATA mode so then we've got our i/o shield Dolby home theater sticker 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 guess it protects the protects the Northbridge heatsink ok so let's get this baby open and have a look so like I mentioned before we've got a 12 k phase power design on this board 12 phases for the CPU itself and then 2 phases for the uncork so they're really really serious about providing a lot of power every component of your system here all right so let's have a look at the general layout of this port it's actually quite similar to the UD six so we've got our socket 1156 right where it belongs your twelve 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 Southbridge Northbridge and mosfet areas are all adequately cooled with kind of a funky funky 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 a 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 UD six when you step down to the UD v 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 eight X electrical now both of these can be run in 8x8 X 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 onboard power and reset switches here and then we've got our 10 10 say the two ports on the back and now let's just have a look at the back i/o so here we go we've got a ps2 mouse keyboard combo port then we've got one two three four five six 10 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 Ethernet 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 UD six so thank you for checking out the p55 ud5 from gigabyte