Gigabyte P55A-UD6 Sata 3 & USB 3.0 Motherboard

CONCLUSION

Well 22 pages later, 3 complete reviews (Motherboard, Seagate Barracuda XT, and Buffalo USB 3.0 Drive enclosure) and several weeks later we like the Gigabyte P55A-UD6 motherboard a lot. It features 24 Phase power, SATA 3, USB 3.0 and is a really easy overclocker.

We aren't seeing much speed increase from the new SATA 3 drives but SATA 3 SSD's will hit the market soon and with those blazing speeds SATA 3 will be a welcome addition to the test rigs. Gigabyte has an X58 variant out with SATA 3 and USB 3.0 and the X58A-UD7 is beckoning us from the review parts storage shelf so you'll be seeing it reviewed soon. Well as soon as we recover from this review. The shrinks say that could be as soon as 3 months (Joke).

We loved the USB 3.0 capabilities of the board and if we hadn't waited on a USB 3.0 drive to test with our conclusion about the GA-P55A-UD6 might have been different. With speeds ranging from 112 - 140MB/s USB 3.0 is a major advantage. USB 2.0 devices have served us well over the years, and E-Sata never really took off like USB did. USB 3.0 when it mainstreams could easily be the death of E-Sata. RIP E-Sata is all we can say, while we have E-Sata Devices around the ease of setup and speed of USB 3.0 just about kills any use we had for E-Sata.

The downside of the P55A-UD6 is that if you use SATA 3 or USB 3.0 Turbo you will be limited to a Single GPU running at 8x. Single GPU users you should know that the PCI-E bandwidth offered by 8x isn't going to affect your GPU performance in the least. Multi-GPU users well that's why we wrote the design and decision page. Gigabyte has implemented the SATA 3 and USB 3.0 interfaces P55 platform wide and made it easily and inexpensively available earlier in the game than any previous evolution of new interfaces we've ever seen. We are not going to knock the implementation because it's more a limitation of the P55 chipset designed by Intel than anything. Gigabyte found a reasonable solution to a hard interface implementation and offers it from $130 to $240 platform wide. That's almost unheard of and if it helps mainstream SATA 3 and USB 3.0 we are all for it. If you happen to have $1500 worth of GPU's in your rig you might want to consider using another solution like the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 which doesn't have bandwidth limitations on the PCI-E slots. However the other 95% of end users with a single GPU looking for high end features without high end prices, sitting on the P55 platform, this is a more than reasonable solution. That's just the way we feel about it. Intel set the limitation of the P55 chipset and the vendors have to find ways to get us the features we want, Gigabyte did just that.

Performance wise we tested the heck out of the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD6 and the performance was as high as the GA-P55-UD6 and GA-P55A-UD4P and rivals any board we've had our hands on. With motherboards all sporting the same basic chipset performance is going to be a neck and neck thing. Features are waht differentiate boards now. On top the great performance we got from the Gigabyte P55A-UD6 the features are top notch. SATA 3 will grow to maturity and boards without SATA 3 will be yesterdays news, boards without USB 3.0 will feel crippled, the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD6 won't have any of those growing pains and we expect that most end users would enjoy both the overclocking and new interfaces knowing that their future technology needs are covered for the next few years.