With the GA-P55-UD6 Gigabyte presents its flagship out of their P55 chipset series. It especially awaits gamers and PC-enthusiasts which are looking for a lot of connectors and features. 
On the following pages we will show you the strenghts and weaknesses of the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6.
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Spezifikationen / Lieferumfang
| CPU | Intel Core i5 / i7 |
| Chipset | Nortbridge: Intel P55 Express |
| Memory | Dual Channel DDR3, 6 x DIMM, Max. 24 GB DDR3, 2600+/2200/1600/1333/1066/ Non-ECC,Un-buffered |
| Multi-GPU | ATI CrossFireX NVIDIA SLI |
| Slots | 3 x PCI-Express x16 (Dual Modus
x8/x8/) 2 x PCI-Express x1 2 x PCI 2.2 |
| Sound | Realtek ALC889A |
| Storage | 10 x SATA 3 Gb/s (RAID 0, 1, 5, 0+1, JBOD) |
| LAN | 2 x Gigabit LAN |
| Firewire | 3 x 1394a ports (2 via Backpanel, 1 via Mainboard Header) |
| USB | 14 x USB 2.0/1.1 Connectors (10 via Backpanel, 4 via Mainboard Header) |
| Fan connectors | 6 Connectors |
| Forfactor | ATX (30.5cm x 24.4cm) |
| BIOS | Bios (1 x 16 Mbit flash) |
- 1 x ATX I/O bezel
- 6 x SATA cable
- 1 x IDE cable
- 1 x Driver CD, 1 x User's Manual
- 1 x SLI/Crossfire Bridge
Regarding the delivery you'll find everything you need and even more to set your brand new motherboard up. Next to six SATA cables you'll also find a SLI bridge.
Software
| @BIOS | Allows you to overclock on the fly with Windows running. |
| Easy Tune6 | Allows you to read all the voltages, temperatures as well as fan rotation speeds within windows. |
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Layout
The Gigabyte P55 UD6 presents itself on a blue PCB with light blue expansion slots as well as passive heatpipe covering northbridge, southbridge and current converters. The design in blue, light blue and which looks good and harmonic.
Gigabyte provided the UD6 with a 24 phase power design. Gigabyte, like most of the well known motherboard manufacturers, uses All-Solid-Capacitors which have an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of 50'000 hours. ASUS itself describes the current supply as "24 Phase power - World's Best Phase Power Desing" which is everything else but not conservative.
Totally you'll find six DIMM-slots on the P55 UD6. Officially supported are DDR3-2600+/2200/1600/1333/1066 with up to 24 GByte capacity. At the moment Gigabyte is the only manufacturer who provides a P55 motherboard with six DIMM-slots.
North-and Southbridge as well as current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe. Because of the relatively big cooling elements you might encounter difficulties whilst installing a big CPU cooler.
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Anschlüsse und I/O
Totally Gigabyte provided the P55 UD6 with ten angled SATA ports which are located below the memory slots. Therefore every office-PC or gaming-system can be equipped with plenty of drives. Even a home file-server could be equipped with a sufficient number of drives. Furthermore the angled SATA connectors allow you to install even todays biggest graphics cards without encountering incompatibilities. Looking at the ports below the memory slots it is possible to use them with a graphics card installed. If you think about setting up a triple SLI or CrossFire system and you want to use the connectors at the bottom edge you'd need to plug a short card into the third PCI Express slot. Another issues is that Gigabyte doesn't deliver a second SLI bridge to drive three graphics cards. Almost standard with Gigabyte motherboards these days are the Start, Reset, CLR-CMOS and MemOK! buttons which can be very useful, especially if you do overclocking and also the debug display can save you a lot of time if you should for example have dead memory modules.
Totally you'll find six fan connectors on the Gigabyte P55 UD6 which is more than enough, to provide a well equipped midrange or high-end-system with fresh air. The fanheaders are located around the CPU socket as well as at the bottom edge of the mainboard.
Looking at the external connectors Gigabyte provided the P55 UD6 with eight USB 2.0, 2x RJ-45, one PS/2 keyboard or mouse, one Optical S/PDIF Out, one Coaxial S/PDIF Out, two eSATA, two Firewire, two Realtek RTL8111D Gigabit LAN as well as one Realtek ALC889A 7.1 High Definition Audio connector panel with six ports.
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BIOS
Following you find BIOS-screens regarding basic configuration options as well as overclocking. Nearly standard these days is the possibility to save and load BIOS-Profiles.
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Testbedingungen
Hardware |
|
| Motherboard |
-
Asus Maximus III Formula - Asus P7P55D-E Premium - Intel DP55KG - Gigabyte P55 UD5 - Gigabyte P55 UD6 |
| Processor | Intel Core i7 870 |
| Memory | 2 GB Kingston PC3 16'000 9-9-9-27 |
| Graphic card | XFX GTX 280 |
| Hard disk | Samsung Spinpoint F1 320 GByte |
| Power supply | bequiet! Dark Power Pro 1000Watt |
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Futuremark
3DMark06
3DMark 06 is getting older these days. Therefore if you are using really powerful graphic cards you will hit CPU limitation which means that the graphic card isn't the bottleneck in the system. This is also the reason why in recent high-end desktop systems 3DMark 06 scales nicely with the CPU and the graphic card has much less influence on the scores.
Total
| 3DMark 06 Total | Percent | |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 17'823 | 102.43 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 17'759 | 102.06 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 17'670 | 101.55 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 17'399 | 100.00 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 17'208 | 98.90 % |
| more is better | ||
CPU
| 3DMark 06 CPU | Percent | |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 5'054 | 102.82 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 5'006 | 101.85 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 4'977 | 101.26 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 4'924 | 100.18 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 4'915 | 100.00 % |
| more is better | ||
3DMark Vantage
3DMark Vantage is able to squeeze nearly everything out of a recent system. Therefore the feature liste is also pretty long: DirectX10, FP16-HDR, motion blur, parallax occlusion mapping, GPU-physics simulation and different shader effects are being used to even make recent high-end systems struggle.
Total
| 3DMark Vantage Total | Percent | |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 14'198 | 100.63 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 14'184 | 100.53 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 14'182 | 100.51 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 14'142 | 100.23 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 14'109 | 100.00 % |
| more is better | ||
CPU
| 3DMark Vantage CPU | Percent | |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 44'512 | 104.56 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 44'366 | 104.19 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 43'479 | 102.13 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 43'227 | 101.54 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 42'570 | 100.00 % |
| more is better | ||
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SiSoft Sandra 1
SiSoft Sandra is a theoretical multi purpose benchmark suite which is able to show differences in CPU architectures. We split the tests with SiSoft Sandra into two parts. Therefore on this page you'll find Arithmetic-, Multimedia- and Cryptography-benchmarks.
Arithmetik
| SiSoft Sandra - Arithmetik - Drystone | Percent | |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 77.07 GIPS | 104.18 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 75.38 GIPS | 101.89 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 75.37 GIPS | 101.87 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 73.98 GIPS | 100.00 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 73.68 GIPS | 99.59 % |
| more is better | ||
| SiSoft Sandra - Arithmetik - Whetstone | Percent | |
| Intel DP55KG | 66.46 GFLOPS | 100.00 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 64.36 GFLOPS | 96.84 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 62.99 GFLOPS | 94.77 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 62.97 GFLOPS | 94.74 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 62.63 GFLOPS | 93.98 % |
| more is better | ||
Multimedia
| SiSoft Sandra - Multimedia - Integer | Percent | |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 134.31 MPixels/sec | 100.29 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 133.92 MPixels/sec | 100.00 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 131.52 MPixels/sec | 98.20 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 131.49 MPixels/sec | 98.18 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 130.59 MPixels/sec | 97.51 % |
| more is better | ||
| SiSoft Sandra - Multimedia - Fliesskomma | Percent | |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 108.12 MPixels/sec | 102.34 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 105.64 MPixels/sec | 100.00 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 105.53 MPixels/sec | 99.89 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 105.51 MPixels/sec | 99.87 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 105.22 MPixels/sec | 99.60 % |
| more is better | ||
Crytography
| SiSoft Sandra - Kryptographie - AES 256 | Percent | |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 377 MB/sec | 101.61 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 371 MB/sec | 100.00 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 369 MB/sec | 99.46 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 369 MB/sec | 99.46 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 367 MB/sec | 98.92 % |
| more is better | ||
| SiSoft Sandra - Kryptographie - SHA 256 | Percent | |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 497 MB/sec | 101.01 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 492 MB/sec | 100.00 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 487 MB/sec | 98.98 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 486 MB/sec | 98.78 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 484 MB/sec | 98.37 % |
| more is better | ||
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SiSoft Sandra 2
At this point we deliver the values regarding Memory Bandwidth, Memory Latency as well as Memory and Cache Access.
Memory bandwidth
| SiSoft Sandra - Speicherbandbreite - Integer | Percent | |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 15.18 GB/sec | 102.22 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 14.99 GB/sec | 100.94 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 14.90 GB/sec | 100.33 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 14.88 GB/sec | 100.20 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 14.85 GB/sec | 100.00 % |
| more is better | ||
| SiSoft Sandra - Speicherbandbreite - Fliesskomma | Percent | |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 15.22 GB/sec | 103.46 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 14.81 GB/sec | 100.67 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 14.72 GB/sec | 100.06 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 14.71 GB/sec | 100.00 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 14.68 GB/sec | 99.79 % |
| more is better | ||
Memory latency
| SiSoft Sandra - Speicherlatenz | Percent | |
| GigabyteP55 UD5 | 73 ns | 93.58 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 74 ns | 94.87 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 76 ns | 97.43 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 78 ns | 100.00 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 80 ns | 102.56 % |
| less is better | ||
Memory and cache access
| SiSoft Sandra - Speicher und Cache Zugriff | Percent | |
| Intel DP55KG | 57.21 GB/sec | 100.00 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 55.96 GB/sec | 97.81 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 54.30 GB/sec | 94.91 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 52.55 GB/sec | 91.85 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 52.51 GB/sec | 91.78 % |
| more is better | ||
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Super Pi 1M / 32M, wPrime
Meanwhile Super Pi even in its latest version has become pretty old. Never the less it is able to show scaling to the clock speed nicely.
Super Pi 1M
| Super Pi 1.5 XS - 1M | Percent | |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 14.134 sec | 99.34 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 14.196 sec | 99.78 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 14.227 sec | 100.00 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 14.243 sec | 100.11 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 14.352 sec | 100.87 % |
| less is better | ||
wPrime 32M
wPrime is based on a multithreaded algorithm to calculate the square root to up to 32 billion digits. Therefore it is possible to put 100 percent load on every core or thread and to see differences between architectures.
| wPrime - 32M | Percent | |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 8.252 sec | 97.92 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 8.346 sec | 99.03 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 8.348 sec | 99.06 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 8.409 sec | 99.78 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 8.427 sec | 100.00 % |
| less is better | ||
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Games
Crysis 800 x 600, low details
Crysis is still one of the games which has very high system requirements. Therefore developer Crytek implemented Direct3D-10-API, High-Dynamic-Range-Rendering, Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Soft Shadows, Motion Blur, Depth of Field as well as Soft Particles. We test Crysis by using DirectX9 as well as DirectX10 to show CPU-sacaling especially which low resolutions. If we look at the high resolutions we are able to spot that the CPUs influence compared to the graphic card becomes much less important.
| Crysis DirectX9 (800 x 600 low details) | Percent | |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 105.78 fps | 108.79 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 101.12 fps | 98.90 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 100.78 fps | 103.65 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 98.67 fps | 101.48 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 97.23 fps | 100.00 % |
| more is better | ||
Resident Evil 800 x 600, low details
Resident Evil uses nearly every modern rendering technology: HDR, Hemisphere Lighting, Soft Shadows, Soft Particles, Field- und Motion-Blur oder auch Alpha to Coverage and static Ambient Occlusion. Furthermore Resident Evil 5 has been optimized for multicore architectures and already comes DirectX11 ready. By using the DirectX9 as well as the DirectX10 benchmark we can again show you CPU-scaling with low resolutions and the compared to the CPU overproportional influence of the graphics card at high resolutions.
| Resident Evil DirectX9 (800 x 600 low details) | Percent | |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 140.5 fps | 116.88 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 139.7 fps | 116.22 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 137.9 fps | 114.72 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 135.6 fps | 112.81 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 120.2 fps | 100.00 % |
| more is better | ||
Street Fighter 4 800 x 600, low details
Street Fighter 4 comes with an extra benchmark version which makes testing you system childrens play. At low resolutions the system requirements are pretty low and we can see CPU-scaling in the results. At high resolution the graphic card becomes more important and the CPUs clock speed has less influence on the fps.
| Street Fighter 4 (800 x 600 low details) | Percent | |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 | 370.77 fps | 104.61 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 360.34 fps | 101.66 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 | 358.55 fps | 101.16 % |
| Asus P7P55D-E Premium | 358.40 fps | 101.12 % |
| Intel DP55KG | 354.43 fps | 100.00 % |
| more is better | ||
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Overclocking
Air
| CPU-z | Percent | |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 4414 MHz | 150.49 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 Overclocked | 4400 MHz | 150.00 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 Overclocked | 4380 MHz | 148.99 % |
| ASRock P55 Extreme Overclocked | 4286 MHz | 146.00 % |
| Intel DP55KG Overclocked | 4009 MHz | 136.69 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula Standard | 2933 MHz | 100.00 % |
| more is better[/de]more is better | ||
| 3DMark06 | Percent | |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 20'585 Marks | 119.62 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 Overclocked | 20'536 Marks | 119.34 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 Overclocked | 20'451 Marks | 118.85 % |
| ASRock P55 Extreme Overclocked | 20'451 Marks | 118.85 % |
| Intel DP55KG Overclocked | 20'295 Marks | 117.94 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula Standard | 17'208 Marks | 100.00 % |
| more is better[/de]more is better | ||
| Super Pi 32M | Percent | |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 Overclocked | 9 m 09.869 sec | 71.47 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 9 m 26.545 sec | 72.05 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 Overclocked | 9 m 35.172 sec | 74.41 % |
| ASRock P55 Extreme Overclocked | 9 m 42.765 sec | 75.74 % |
| Intel DP55KG Overclocked | 10 m 10.319 sec | 79.32 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula Standard | 13 m 06.365 sec | 100.00 % |
| less is better[/de]less is better | ||
| Max. BCLK | Percent | |
| Asus Maximus III Formula | 230 MHz | 172.93 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD6 Overclocked | 225 MHz | 169.17 % |
| Gigabyte P55 UD5 Overclocked | 225 MHz | 169.17 % |
| ASRock P55 Extreme Overclocked | 223 MHz | 167.17 % |
| Intel DP55KG Overclocked | 181 MHz | 136.09 % |
| Asus Maximus III Formula Standard | 133 MHz | 100.00 % |
| more is better[/de]more is better | ||
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Fazit
| General | + | - | |
| The P55 UD6 is Gigabytes flagship regarding the P55 chipset series and it was designed for gamers and PC-enthusiasts. Therefore it is also provided with a lot of features. Very special about the UD6 is the possibility to use up to six memory modules which at the moment is unique for a P55 series motherboard. |
- Delivery - 6 DIMM-Slots |
- Price | |
| Layout | + | - | |
| The Gigabyte P55 UD6 leaves a well structured and very clean impression. The colours are well chosen and the optics are convincing if you like different blue tones. Using SATA connectors which were angled by 90 degrees there will be no problem when installing huge graphics cards as for example a Radeon HD 5970. The only issue we spotted is the fact that when you use three graphics cards you wont be able to access the connectors at the bottom edge of the mainboard. We'd also wish that there was a second SLI/CrossFire Bridge. |
- Colour concept - angled connectors - onboard Power / Reset / CMOS-Clear |
- Connectors at bottom
edge - Only one SLI/CF Bridge |
|
| Performance | + | - | |
| This motherboards weak point definitely is the performance which just isn't sufficient for a high-end product. Looking at the 2D and 3D benchmarks it is around the center span. In benchmarks that need a lot of memory bandwidth it even falls back to the last place. We hope that Gigabyte will release BIOS updates which bring the UD6 closer to the top products regarding performance. |
- Performance - Memory bandwidth |
||
| Overclocking | + | - | |
| Overclocking the Gigabyte P55 UD6 is absolutely no problem and easy. The motherboard is well tempered if we look at the different settings and it always starts even if you - on purpose - chose settings which are massively too high. Also the BLCK of 235 MHz we reached is a very good value. |
- BCLK 235 MHz - BIOS |
||
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| Gigabytes P55 flagship wasn't able to convice us and this is especially because of its performance. It just isn't enough for a high-end motherboard. On the other hand, if we look a the delivery the board acts as a role model. Onboard you'll find really everything you could possibly need. We'd recommend Gigabytes P55 UD6 to anyone who just wants to have the top end board out of a specific series or people who need a lot of SATA ports also a lot of features. |
- PC-Enthusiasts - Overclockers |
- - Price / Performance-PC | |
| The Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 can be bought at Digitec to a price of CHF 306.- (est. EUR 204.-). | |||
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Author: m.salathe@ocaholic.ch Copy edited and translated: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch