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
First up is Gigabyte’s GA-P55M-UD2. You can purchase this board for around $105~$110.
Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 Feature Set
Gigabyte includes the standard array of components like the Realtek ALC888B HD audio codec, Realtek RTL8111D Gigabit LAN controller, T.I. TSB43AB23 IEEE 1394a chipset, GSATA2 (JMB363) chipset, and full support for the Core i7/i5 S1156 processor series.
Gigabyte also includes a rather sparse accessories bundle. You get the standard rear I/O panel cover along with 1 x IDE cable, 2 x SATA cables, a well-written and informative manual, and software CD. We understand the need to cut costs where possible to meet a $100 price target, but including at least one USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394a bracket for the headers would have been appreciated.
BIOS
Gigabyte also includes one of the most extensive BIOS designs in an entry level micro-ATX motherboard that we have seen recently. The BIOS is setup for overclocking and includes all the basic settings: CPU multiplier, PCI-E bus, Bclk frequency, memory multipliers, and nearly every voltage setting you will need. Gigabyte includes Load Load-Line Calibration (LLC) and PCH Core (P55) voltage settings for additional overclocking duties. LLC will help to eliminate line droop on the VCore line. We still recommend having LLC disabled in most situations, but if you have to reach a certain overclock for benchmarking, then you should probably enable it. Generally, we do not need PCH voltages in our experience but it is nice to have the feature.
Two strengths of the BIOS are the granular voltage settings and memory timing options for an entry level board. Gigabyte allows you to tweak CPU clock skews, channel independent DRAM settings, and CPU/PCI clock drives although we found the auto settings to be just about perfect.
One last feature we would like to mention is the Q-Flash utility that is accessed via the F8 key. Q-Flash can read files directly from a USB flash drive making BIOS updating a simple and safe procedure. We tried this feature 30 times as part of our testing routine and it never failed.
We did have a couple of slight disappointments with the BIOS. In the voltage setting options, Gigabyte does not provide the base voltages that the board defaults to at startup. Our other complaint has to do with the PC Health section, as the lack of SmartFan adjustments for the lone chassis header is not available. The CPU SmartFan adjustment for the CPU is limited to Auto/Voltage/PWM without the ability to determine temperature ranges. Oh how do we miss abit’s uGuru technology. Other than that, we were impressed with the BIOS considering the entry level nature of the board.
BIOS Information
Let’s take a brief look at the BIOS. We discussed the features earlier, but a visual representation sometimes speaks louder than words.
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goinginstyle - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
I loved the review also and it showed a lot of work went into testing these boards. I just wonder when TA152H is going to ruin this thread but until then it nice to see constructive posts. I also wish the mobo guys would just drop the floppy and IDE ports when possible. It would free up board real estate and hopefully drop the cost a little more.papapapapapapapababy - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
not touching any of this at least it has Socket 775 mounting holesusb3 @ pci3 @sata6 and im there.
Docket - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
It is a shame that there are no Linux versions of the Gigabyte software reviewed here... oh well maybe some day in a distant future.mitt - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
Hallelujah! DPC latency benchmark in AnandTech reviews!mathew7 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
When MB manufacturers are going to let go of PCI?I recently switched to Micro-ATX, and found I have a real problem of choosing a motherboard.
I'm looking at buying a PCIe X-Fi, but would like to use a dual-slotted video card. But I would like to keep my options open for a second card (I'm htinking about physics, not SLI/CF, so dual-slot cooling is not required). While the Gigabyte does not pass my requirements, the Asrock also has a problem: usage of a dual-slot-cooled card inhibits the usage of the PCIex1 slot.
I intend to switch to i5/P55 at the start of next year, so I'm watching closely.
Jaybus - Thursday, October 8, 2009 - link
That will be a slow transition. There are still a lot of PCI adapters being sold out there, especially for some specialty markets like scientific instrumentation that take time to transition to new interfaces due to cost and low volume. Nevertheless, the demise of PCI is starting to happen. For most people it's not a big deal, because they only need 1 or 2 PCIe x16 slots for graphics cards and will never use the rest of the slots anyway.MadMan007 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
Kind of funny but Intel is leading the pack in that specific area, their $200 (ugh) 'Extreme' DP55SB mATX P55 mobo has no PCI slots, also no PS/2, IDE or floppy. Maybe it's consistent since they ditched PS/2 and other legacy connectors on some boards a while back. No telling on the overclocking front but it is an 'extreme' board so it may have at elast some overclocking features. It has a couple of neat features actually, Bluetooth and Intel NIC.Jaybus - Thursday, October 8, 2009 - link
And uATX is a good platform to remove PCI from. Why not drop it from uATX? They can always leave it on ATX boards for a while for those who absolutely need PCI slots. I think other manufacturers will follow that path very soon.MadMan007 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
*bzzt* The only PCIe 2.0 lanes on a P55 platform are from the CPU. So look carefully at specs and double check with companies when they say their secondary slots, especially ones that aren't even 16x mechanical, are PCIe 2.0. The UD2's 4x electrical slot in particular is clearly not according to Gigabyte, the ASRock claims to be but I'm not sure how if all 16 CPU PCIe 2.0 lanes are used for the graphics slot. If they used a lane splitter to provide PCIe 2.0 lanes to the other slots it kind of defeats the purpose, and if so it would be good to check performance with those slots populated.MadMan007 - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
To follow up on this, the comment was based on the first few paragraphs. I looked over Intel's manual for their 'extreme' mATX board for my post about it and Intel actually states their mobo has PCIe 2.0 lanes to the additional PCIe slots. Not surprising for the 8x slot I guess but it is for the 1x slots and it seems unlikely Intel would misquote specs.On a related note there is one thing I've not seen yet from any review and that is how PCIe lanes get assigned, mainly to the primary 16x slot, when populating a secondary PCIe slot with a 1x or 4x card. Do the lane splitter chips assign 8x lanes to a secondary slot which has a 1x or 4x card or what? Not a huge deal but it's a little thing that would be nice to know.