[Deanzo]

Hey guys,

During my time at the Gigabyte open over clocking chapionships in Taipei, I had an opportunity to have a sneak peek at Gigabytes upcoming motherboard lineup.

As I've used both the EX 58 UD5, and UD4P at home and in competition, I'm very eager to see how the P55 equivalent stack up.
Unfortunately these boards are under NDA, so we were not allowed to test them in any way, but I was able to get some pictures of the upcoming P55 UD4P, next to a X58 UD4P. For a comparison between the two chipsets that carry the same end model number.








Lets have a wee look at the up coming P55 UD4P


The first thing that catches my eye, is the placement of the first two PCI-e slots. Lots of room for large vga cards with double slot coolers, or LN2 pots if you're into that kind of thing
From my understanding these boards will be CF and SLI compatible just like X58.




The socket area is nice and open, so after market coolers shouldn't be a problem.




It supports four SATA-III ports and six SATA-II ports.




Power, Reset and Clear CMOS buttons have moved to the bottom right hand corner.
Having the Clear CMOS button on the board is great for a bencher like me, on the back panel would be better for a 24/7 setup in a case, but how many times does that kind of user use it ? so I'm happy to see it's move.





Talking about the back panel.
Some cool new things there, Power over e-sata is something even I could get worked up over.
The idea of just having an SSD in my bag, and just plug it into one of these when I'm on the go would work very well for me.
I hope to see this on all boards, and the price of SSD's come down even more soon.






As soon as they go on sale, I will be picking one of these and an i5 cpu up.
And I'll give you the full run down on how I feel it stacks up next to it's big brother the X58.