Gigabyte introduces Micro-ATX P55 board

The coming of Intel's new Lynnfield quadcore processor also brings a large variety of motherboards with the matching Intel P55 chipset. During the Computex, Intel already showed several models, but a lot of progress has been made since. To serve the increasing demand for Micro-ATX boards, Gigabyte has developed a small, but well-equipped motherboard.

Gigabyte Micro-ATX P55 will be named GA-P55M-UD4 and features two graphics card slots. These slots are controlled by the PCI-Express controller in the processor, which is able to power up to 16 lanes. This means that when two graphics cards are in use, eah will only have an 8x bandwidth. The chipset controls the small PCI-Express 4x slot between the two GPU slots and the extra PCI slot. The motherboard is built using the Ultra Durable 3 design, which means high-quality components and additional copper has been used in the PCB. This should make the board ore efficient and increase the stability during overclocks, though the latter is hard to verify.

The GA-P55M-UD4 has four DDR3 memory slots and a large heatsink on top of its power design, which can be found around the socket. There are seven SATA connectors, one of which is an eSATA. Gigabyte has also added some older connectors to the board, including PATA and Floppy. The I/O panel has all the conventional connectors, such as Gigabit LAN, USB, FireWire, 7.1 audio and PS/2.

Gigabyte's GA-P55M-UD4 a Micro-ATX sized P55 board

Tags: computex ddr3 esata firewire overclocking pata sata usb p55 corei5

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