Introduction

Gigabyte is always evolving and innovating new boards. If you remember, they were the first to incorporate USB 3.0 onto their mainboards. Today, we will take a look at their latest top notch feature rich Intel P55 chipset mainboard - GA-P55A-UD7. This board will be available in the channels from FEB 2010.

The Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD7 is eye catching. The first thing I noticed is the heatpipe with water cooling combo. As the picture is taken using a phone, the quality doesn't reveal the colour that well. The heatpipe isn't copper colour but it is in between copper and brown. It really look very different from the heatpipes used on other boards. The 24 power phase caps also surround the unique coloured CPU socket.

The next thing we noticed is the 4 full length PCIe slots. As we are aware, the previous P55 solutions, the number of lanes isn't enough and once USB 3.0 turbo mode is enabled, the VGA card will operate in PCIe x8 mode. In this design, it promises to solve this by introducing the PLX PCIe switch chipset. In addition, this board also incorporates the NVIDIA NF200 chipset, allowing it to support SLI on this board.

The board uses a 2oz PCB design for better cooling. There is also 1394, Dual GbE, USB3.0, SATA3 (6Gbps) support on this board. There is a Power switch right below the DIMM slots and a Debug LED on the left bottom corner of the mainboard.

More detail photos can be found on page 2.

Next >>>