GIGABYTE P55A-UD7 Motherboard Review :: Layout

Board

Sysfan

Back of PCB

CPU area

GIGABYTE went with a purple PCB for the motherboard as is their wont with their motherboards. Starting on the top right corner of the motherboard is the SysFan 3. Below that fan header is the 8-pin power connector at an angle to the board. The MOSFETs are covered by heatsinks connected by a heatpipe. This heatpipe leads to another heatsink with water-cooling blocks covering the NF200 chip and PEX8608 chip.

MOSFET heatsink

MOSFET heatsink 2

NF200 chipset

SilentPipe

The CPU area is surrounded by the Phase Power PWM circuits. This board has 24-phase power. The CPU area has plenty of room for aftermarket cooling systems. The heatpipe from the NF200 and PEX8608 chips leads out to the P55 chipset heatsink. GIGABYTE really had a lot of work put into cooling all of the chips and goes further by having the SilentPipe heatsink module that is installed separately. There is a 7 logo on the P55 chipset heatsink.

CPUFan header

Memory

Waterblock

MOSFET heatsink

The CPUFan header is below the MOSFET heatsink and is of the 4-pin variety. Below the CPU Fan header are the memory slots. The P55A-UD7 board has four DIMM slots that take up to 16GB of DDR3 memory. The board natively supports DDR3-2600+ speeds, but as the memory controller is on the CPU itself, the normal clock speed on the memory is limited to 1333MHz when not overclocked. DDR3 memory has reached very high speeds.

24-pin power

IDE connector

SATA ports

SATA2 controller

The bottom of the board starts off with the 24-pin power connector. To the left of the 24-pin power is the IDE connector, a holdover from previous motherboard generations, but welcome as some people still use IDE DVD drives. To the left of the IDE controller are the SATA ports. The board has 10 onboard SATA ports, with eight controlled by the P55 and two controlled by the Marvell controller that provides support for SATA 6 Gb/second and two SATA2 ports controlled by the GIGABYTE SATA controller.

Expansion

PCI Express locks

ASMT chips

P55 chipset

Expansion on this board consists of two PCI Express x16 slots, two PCI Express x16 slots, a PCI Express x1 slot, and two PCI slots. The PCI Express x16 and x8 slots are PCI Express 2.0 compliant, meaning they will have double the bandwidth of Generation 1.0 slots. When one video card is installed, the x16 slot operates at x16 mode. The PCI x8 slots share bandwidth with the corresponding PCI x16 slots. If two cards are installed in PCIEX16_1 and PCIX8_1 they will operate in x8 mode.

FDD

COM1

Front Panel

NEC USB 3.0 chip

Onboard sound is provided by a Realtek ALC889 CODEC. This CODEC is a High Definition capable sound chip with support for multi-streaming (7.1+2 channel simultaneous), Dolby Home Theater, S/PDIF In/Out and CD In. The ALC889 is a popular onboard sound solution for many motherboard companies. The rear I/O on the board consists of a PS/2 keyboard/mouse port, a coaxial S/PDIF Out connector, an optical S/PDIF Out connector, 2 IEEE-1394a ports, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports, 2 eSATA/USB combo ports, 2 RJ-45 ports and 6 audio jacks for the onboard audio.

ALC889

Audio control panel

Driver version

Rear I/O