Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

With the P67A-UD4 Gigabyte brings an appealing motherboard to the market. Though taste of course differs it is by far the most beautiful to look at P67 motherboard to date, I mean seriously the new aesthetic design is such an improvement over the standard Gigabyte blue colored motherboards, and even current competition. Tagged with a sales price of roughly 170~175 EUR in the initial phase you receive a very full-grown motherboard with admirable specs and features.

Realistically though, in the same price segment we have ASUS and MSI motherboards offering some more extra's over the UD4; features like like OC buttons, micro-buttons for Power ON/OFF, Reset and CMOS CLEAR buttons, diagnostic POST LEDs, additional SATA controllers, voltage monitoring points and so on. Another strong selling point has to be the new EFI BIOS implementation which Gigabyte did not implement either. Granted these are all non-essential features but yeah, the competition does offer them for the same amount of money and especially the EFI BIOS right now is a strong selling point.

However, you're nothing short of anything, you get all the basics and more. We very much like the fact that two NEC USB controllers are to be found on this board, but then Gigabyte leaves out extra USB 3.0 headers so effectively you can only use two out of the four USB connectors as there's no USB 3.0 bracket with two header you can install in an empty PCI Slot. These choices puzzle me.

SATA wise you'll receive four SATA2 and four SATA3 (6G) connectors of which two are eSATA ports at the back IO panel, that is good for sure.

Component usage is done Ultra Durable style and includes a thicker copper printed circuit boards. The component selection was done properly alright. Just under the grey heatsink we can see new CPU MOSFETs, Gigabyte calls these Driver MOS MOSFETS, also notable is the fact that board features Gigabyte's DualBIOS technology to ensure a better level of failure protection.

The baseline performance is on par with the reference Intel motherboard, give or take a few random occurrences. Overclocking wise we hoped for something  a little better. We had to forfeit at 4.5 GHz, but granted that is still a really great overclock alright. We've seen results over 5 GHz elsewhere though, so this very likely was isolated to us, fixable with a simple firmware update.

So let's sum it up, the P67A-UD4 is a Sandy Bridge processor ready motherboard with a nice feature set. Connectivity wise you are set and good to go, that rear IO panel is just chucked full with connectors. The feature set is good as well, the baseline performance again good. We did expect an EFI BIOS however Gigabyte stuck to the original BIOS. Overclocking, it was okay, but we expect this to get better with a BIOS update or two as the board and it's design definitely caters a good tweak alright. Speaking about overclocking, bare in mind, to do what we did today you'll need a K model Sandy Bridge processor with the unlocked multiplier.

The Gigabyte P67A-UD4 is an absolutely lovely motherboard, it perhaps could have had a little more edge features wise with the competition in mind, but it is without doubt an excellent and very stable motherboard. The one thing that might be the decisive factor could be the boards awesome new color schema, it immediately jumps out and is one of the coolest motherboards we've ever seen. Definitely recommended.

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