Our colleagues from TPU received a photo of the upcoming Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD7 motherboard, the final version of the motherboard has a number of notable changes from the pictures that circulated on the web a couple of months ago. The retail version features four PCI Express x16 slots instead of three, and features several design changes.

The area south of the CPU socket (typically where you expect a Northbridge to be located in older generation motherboards), has the nForce 200 and PLX bridge chips. This is cooled by a fusion heatsink which can be connected to a water-cooling loop. It can also offload heat from the CPU VRM and PCH heatsinks. Of the ten internal SATA ports, six are 3 Gb/s ports provided by the P55 PCH, two 3 Gb/s ports from a Gigabyte GSATA2 controller (which also gives out an IDE connector), and two 6 Gb/s ports from a Marvell-made controller. Other features include two color-coded blue USB 3.0 ports, several USB 2.0 ports, Firewire, two gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and 8-channel HD Audio with optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs.