Gigabyte P55 UD5 review - Gallery - the P55 UD5 motherboard

Socket LGA 1156 folks. Meet the new socket design for Core i5 processors. 12 Phase power design. Everything nicely passively cooled, we like no noise products alright. Below the processor socket you can spot the dual-channel DIMM slots, DDR3. Let's go over there.

Once we flip the board around once more we stumble into the DIMM slots, DDR3 of course. It really is a bit of a shame that Intel decided to leave Triple channel memory only available to Core i7 related products. Then again, the new point to point interface on the Core i5/i7 series will maximize bandwidth, and even at dual-channel with Core i5, that will be an lot of bandwidth alright.

Up-to 16GB may be installed and the board will actually support 2200 MHz straight out of the BIOS (!)

Overall board design is great by the way. Everything is positioned really well. But let's move onward to the left side where we stumble into a bunch of SATA connectors with the 90 degree bed so they will not block graphics cards.

In total we get an astonishing 10x SATA II ports and then at the back panel we again see two eSATA ports. That is just a heap of connectivity.

Lovely to see, a power on/off button, reset micro switch and CLEAR CMOS button.