Gigabyte P55-UD6 – Design

The Gigabyte P55-UD6 employs an odd colour scheme that combines baby blue with white, dark blue and some gun metal gray. The color scheme doesn't look bad, merely it doesn't look terribly nifty either. For those that don't listen a splash of infant bluish, the layout is excellent.

Something you may observe about the pattern of the Gigabyte P55-UD6 is that it looks much like any other motherboard, and by that we mean any other motherboard that features the traditional northward and south span fries.

Rather than placing the P55 flake in the lower correct corner of the lath like virtually every other P55 motherboard, Gigabyte has given information technology a more central location, exactly where you would expect to discover the north span.

There is however some other large heatsink down where the south span would be typically located. Here Gigabyte has called to cool the "Gigabyte SATA2" (JMB363) and i of the JMicron JMB362 controllers. Gigabyte decided to passively cool merely i of the two JMB362 controllers, though neither controller requires cooling of any type, nor does the Gigabyte SATA2 controller in theory.

Cooling the huge array of power fries surrounding the LGA1156 socket are a pair of aluminum heatsinks continued using a single heatpipe. This same heatpipe also extends to the heatsink cooling the P55 scrap and the smaller heatsink covering the Gigabyte SATA2 and JMicron JMB362 controllers. While this is a complex cooling design for a P55 motherboard, it is not over the top either, especially compared to many P45, X48 and X58 motherboards.

Equally nosotros've mentioned the Gigabyte P55-UD6 includes half dozen DIMM slots rather than the typical four. Despite this they have managed to fit everything rather well without creating a cramped board layout. In order to avert the common DIMM/PCIe x16 slot disharmonize Gigabyte has placed the main PCIe x16 slot further down the board.

The main and secondary PCIe x16 slots are even so separated past a PCIe x1 and PCI slot leaving aplenty room between graphics cards that employ dual-slot coolers. In full, the P55-UD6 features 3 PCIe x16 slots, 2 PCIe x1 slots and ii PCI slots which should provide more than enough room to expand.

Along the right side of the motherboard we have a total of viii SATA ports, all of which have been mounted at a xc-degree angle. The ATX ability connectors are also well placed with easy access to both the 24-pin and 8-pivot connectors. At the bottom of the P55-UD6 there are just a pair of USB 2.0 headers supporting four ports. This ways the rest of the ports should be located on the boards I/O panel so let'south cheque that out...

The P55-UD6 has an extremely busy I/O console that features virtually every connectedness you could perchance need. In that location is a unmarried PS/two connector supporting either a keyboard or mouse, 8 USB 2.0 ports, ii Firewire ports, ii eSATA ports, 2 LAN ports, 6 audio jacks and a S/PDIF and Coaxial connector.