Gigabyte P67A-UD4 review - Introduction

So guys meet one of the best looking P67 motherboards to date, the Gigabyte P67A-UD4 the third P67 chipset based motherboard along a long line of series 67 motherboards we have in queue for a review. See, one of the most talked about topics of technology this year will be Sandy Bridge from Intel and very likely Bulldozer processors from AMD. Intel however started the year fresh and launched a handful of these little Sandy bridge gems already. If you have not done so, please read our reference Core i5 2500K and Core i7 2600K review to get an update on the new processor architecture and the grand performance they deliver.

Of course with new processors also come new motherboard chipsets. For the consumer desktop side of the market you will basically see two Sandy Bridge based chipsets, H68 for the more generic, mainstream and HTPC usage, and then the P67 chipset as a performance part for the new motherboards series. Now each and every motherboard ODM jumped on P67 as well, it's just a heck of a lot of fun. And the ODMs had time to prep their P67 alright, most of the designs were already finished by late Summer 2010, everybody just needed to wait for Intel to release the processor that goes along with these motherboards.

That extra time was however not a bad thing, it gave more time to R&D departments to refine their designs and perhaps be a little more creative.

In today's article we'll show you a new offering from Gigabyte as we'll review their P67A-UD4 Sandy bridge ready motherboard. You'll notice a very impressive motherboard loaded with features and technologies, and a little extra as well.

Powered by Intel's P67 chipset, we'll review that stunning looking P67A-UD4 Sandy bridge ready motherboard. A motherboard that is using a 12+2 phases design cooled by passive grey heatsinks.

Some key features:

• PCIe 2.0 graphic interfaces support both 2 way NVIDIA SLI and 2 way ATI CrossFireX
• All New Matte Black PCB and Thermal Design
• Supports 2 Power eSATA connectors for enhanced Storage flexibility
• 4 USB 3.0 ports with superfast transfer rates of up to 5 Gbps
• Extensive 12 phase power Design for CPU VRM
• Support for dual channel DDR3 memory
• 8 SATA Ports with RAID (6 onboard, 2 rear)
• Precision OV provides more precise voltage control for CPU, Chipset and memory
• GIGABYTE DualBIOS Technology
• Provides Marvell SE9128 and Intel P67 high speed SATA3 storage interface

Of course features like SATA 6G and USB 3 are available as well, and guess what, the board supports SLI and Crossfire, albeit in a x8:x8 configuration. There is a more to be found with three additional PCIe x1 slots and two traditional PCI slots.

We'll have a look at that as well of course. Have a peek at the board review from today and then head onwards to the next page, where we'll dive into a photo shoot of the Sandy Bridge ready motherboard.