Hunting for the best Intel P55 board can be a chore. Price, performance, reliability all comes into play. These days, some people also go for overclockability stability. Mainboard manufacturers are also adding more and more features to their mainboards to differentiate from their competitors.

Gigabyte has a range of P55 products. Features wise, the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 is it's top notch board in this series. Featuring a 24 Phase power and Ultra durable - 2oz copper PCB for more stability. It's uniqueness also include 6 DIMM slots compared to 4 dimms on most P55 implementations. There is also the GIGABYTE eXtreme Hard Drive (X.H.D), an easy way to boost hard drive performance. There is also the eSATA/USB combo port. Another uniqueness it support TPM and it allows one to lock the protected data remotely using a Bluetooth® enabled mobile phone. Of course there is the SMART 6 - dual bios, quick boot, quick boost, recovery recorder and time lock.

Performance wise, the board did well in benchmarks, be it in single or SLI mode with a 285 GTX board. Installing it is a breeze too. Overclocking wise, this board is simply amazing. We installed the Core i5 750 on this board. We used the Intel retail original heatsink. By just changing the multiplier to 20x and BCLK to 200MHz and XMP enabled. The board booted and is rock stable with 3DMark06, Vantage benchmarking even in SLI mode. All the voltages were automatically tuned up to support the overclocked speed at 4GHz. Super PI is also OK at 4.2GHz.

In conclusion, I think the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 is an impressive board with tons of features that are not available on other brands. It also borrowed some concepts which are useful e.g. the Combo USB/eSATA. The only regret is that it did not include a SATA3 controller on board or as part of the package. Although the price is a bit steep, that is because of the extra goodies on board which makes it different from the rest.

Discuss

Pros

• TPM
• Combo eSATA/USB powered ports
• Smart 6
• 2oz copper PCB
• XHD
• 6 DIMM slots

Cons

• No SATA3

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.