Budget Micro-ATX P55 Faceoff: Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 and ASRock P55M Pro
by Gary Key on October 5, 2009 12:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
ASRock P55M Pro Layout
ASRock designed a very good layout for this board. The same negatives apply for this board as it did for the Gigabyte UD2, that is the continued inclusion of the floppy drive port, lack of passive cooling for the MOSFET area, and only two of the three fan headers offer temperature or speed controls. It is also difficult to install memory with a full size video card installed in the x16 PCIe slot.
The board does support CrossFireX operation although we highly recommend against this setup as the second PCIe x16 slot is actually an x4 electrical slot running off the P55 chipset with performance suffering up to 30% depending on the choice of video card and game.
ASRock utilizes a high quality four-phase plus one PWM setup on this board. The CPU area is open and will accommodate larger coolers like the Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme. Large push/pull coolers like the Vigor Monsoon III LT will block the first DIMM slot and potentially can interfere with the first PCIe x16 slot. A nice benefit that ASRock included is the ability to utilize a S775 cooler on this board. An old Q6600 cooler performed significantly better than the retail i5/750 in offline testing.
We are not crazy about the lack of passive heatsinks on the MOSFETs when overclocking, especially for the upper end limits for 24/7 stability. However, the MOSFETs only reached 59.6C under full load with our i7/860 operating at 4.1GHz. MOSFET load temps reached 49.8C with the i5/750 at 4.1GHz. We ran the board for about 200 hours with the 860 overclocked with the case fans turned off without a problem. This left just the Corsair 750HX providing air exhaust capabilities.
The IDE port, 24-pin ATX power connector, four DIMM slots, and four SATA 3G ports are located in the lower right hand corner of the board. This board supports dual channel memory configurations and 16GB of DDR3 memory when using 4GB DIMMS. Installing the memory with a video card inserted in the first slot is difficult but not impossible.
The placement of the
SATA ports is interesting compared to other board micro-ATX board designs. After
installing the board in several SFF cases, we have to say that we like it. But, we suggest the user installs the SATA
cables before installing the video card.
ASRock includes two PCIe x16 slots (x16 operation for the first slot, x4 operation for the second slot), one PCIe x1 slot, and a single PCI slot. The PCIe x1 slot will be unavailable when utilizing a dual slot video card. The front panel header, three USB headers, IEEE 1394a header, and floppy drive connector are located at the edge of the board.
The I/O panel is full. We have six USB 2.0 ports (total of twelve on the board), PS/2 mouse and keyboards ports, dual eSATA/USB powered ports from the P55, IEEE 1394a port offered by the Via VT6330 chipset, Gigabit Ethernet LAN port via the Realtek RTL8111D chipset, optical out/coaxial out S/PDIF ports, and the audio panel that provides 8-channel audio output from the Via VT1708S HD audio codec.
Tech
ASRock also features lower ESR solid capacitors, lower RDS(on) MOSFETs, and high quality chokes on their entry level board. This board is also EuP ready and features ASRock’s Instant Boot technology. We think the board is extremely well built for a $100 design considering the average cost of a P55 motherboard is around $153.
DPC Latency
Our test used the Core i5/750
at stock settings with 8GB of memory installed with timings set to 6-6-6-18 at
DDR3-1333. The latency numbers for the ASRock board are lower and more consistent than the Gigabyte board.
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yacoub - Tuesday, October 6, 2009 - link
785G is just onboard graphics halfbreed between 780 and 790 or whatever. until AMD releases a new line of high-end boards worth reviewing, why bother?haplo602 - Wednesday, October 7, 2009 - link
P55 is just half a chipset, i5 took over some of the functionality anyway ... why bother ?tommy101 - Wednesday, September 8, 2010 - link
beastyhacks79.smfnew.com the best psp hacking sitebollux78 - Tuesday, October 6, 2009 - link
Why do we need PCI anymore? I´ll tel you why: The PCI bus is more than enough for a hell bunch of applications, that´s it. If you have a damn good sound card or video capture, or whatever the card you have, and it´s PCI, you´d love to have the slot in there, because you don need to ditch that card and bet a "fantastic" PCIE x1 new card.C´mon people, let´s use the computer for the right purpose, not just to give money to the manufacturers buying new parts that you don´t
necessarily need.
I know, I´m being inflexible and oldschool, but, please, evolution is one thing, marketing is a completely different animal.
strikeback03 - Tuesday, October 6, 2009 - link
IMO it is more a board real estate problem than a case of buying the latest and greatest. On these P55 uATX boards you have 4 slots, one of which has to be devoted to graphics unless it is a headless server. If you use a dual slot graphics card (which a substantial portion of the readers on this site) you lose a second slot, and ideally you would have an open slot beneath that to ease airflow. So that leaves you with one or in a pinch two slots, therefore what interface they are is quite important. PCIe has been out on boards for what, 5-6 years now? I'd say its time to stop selling PCI cards and leave the PCI slots only on full ATX boards (plus maybe a few HTPC-oriented uATX boards) and let the interface finally die off.Though I'd say IDE has even less of a place now, SATA hard drives have been the norm for years and even optical drives for a few years. Time to upgrade if you are still carting one of those around.
sonicdeth - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
Thanks Gary for the detailed review. Can't wait for the p55 roundup, and I'm also very interested now in your audo codec review.mindless1 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
... but I don't see the sense in SLI on mATX. Using the typical long video cards means you can't have a shorter depth case, just shorter height and since when is the area above your computer case a vital piece of real-estate?With 2, 8 or 16X slots onboard it only makes sense to me to go full ATX, is someone with the system budget to build a powerhouse gaming machine really poor enough, indescriminating enough, or young enough (to not have desirable cards from past systems) they don't want to add some other cards?
I hate to say it but this is getting to be a madness, the idea that we need to focus centrally on gaming ability of a board. Most people are not hard core gamers, but factually speaking, most hard core gamers don't do SLI either. Granted you can use a 16x slot for cards with fewer lanes, that seems the only saving grace for the two boards.
It's getting to the point I want a cTX case design where the drive racks are not in front of the mainboard and PSU, they are above them, so the case is even taller than std. ATX but not as deep.
Might tip over a little easier but earthquakes are rare here and plenty of other household items are more tip-happy than that would be.
strikeback03 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
There are cases made to hold a uATX board lying on the bottom, making it kinda a wider Shuttle. I'm personally looking for full ATX as well though, as the height doesn't matter too much to me (pretty sure anything short of a ABS Canyon or some of the bizarre decorative cases would fit under my desk) and don't want to limit my slot selection.Sunburn74 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
Hey Anand,Gigabyte boards have on issue that drives me nuts. As soon as you start overclocking them, you lose the ability to S3 sleep. When you do your maximal overclocks for various board reviews, would you mind testing if S3 sleep was maintained at those maximal overclocks?
Gary Key - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
This board resumes from S3 (USB keyboard) at up to 215 Bclk (mentioned in the thoughts section, make that more visible next time) with our setup and that includes an external hard drive on the Firewire port which is properly instructed to shut down and restart.