Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD6 and GA-P55A-UD4P Review

tacohunter52 - February 11, 2010
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Testing:

From what we've seen so far, the P55H-A isn't the best board in town. However, a judgment cannot be passed until it has gone through the entire OCC Benchmarking Suite. This includes a series of synthetic and real world benches that will allow us to accurately size up the P55H-A. I will be testing both motherboards at stock settings, and then with the CPU overclocked. I will use the following hardware and comparison boards.

Testing Setup:

Processor(s): Intel Core i5 750
Motherboard(s): Gigabyte P55A-UD4P and Gigabyte P55A-UD6
Memory: Corsair Dominator 2x2 GB DDR3 1600 Cas 8
Video Card: Nvidia GTX 260 Core 216
Power Supply: Antec 1000W Modular Power Supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 500GB 7200.11
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate

Comparison Motherboards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked Settings: (P55A-UD4P)

Processor: Intel Core i5 750 207x21 4346MHz
System Memory: Corsair Dominator 1656MHz 8-8-8-20

At first I had a lot of trouble overclocking with this motherboard. Part of it was because I was not used to how the BIOS was organized, however I soon overcame that challenge. Another problem I had, was my hardware was being finicky with the multiplier of 19, which is usually not the case. For some reason these newer chips like odd numbered multipliers, so I decided to stick with a multiplier of 21 rather then staying with the beloved 20. I began by increasing the FSB in increments of 10, and then increasing the voltage when needed. I also tried to run my memory as close to 1600MHz as I could. For this reason I would occasionally have to adjust the memory multiplier, which was extremely easy to do. I was surprised because, on every other 1156 board I've used, I've only been able to get my i5 to around 4.1Ghz. With the UD4P, I was able to push slightly above 4.3GHz. Not to shabby! I'm sure with a bit more tweaking one could do some serious damage with this board.

Overclocked Settings: (P55A-UD6)

Processor: Intel Core i5 750 206x20 4120Hz
System Memory: Corsair Dominator 1648MHz 8-8-8-20

Overclocking on the P55A-UD6 was almost the same as with the UD4P. In fact, I originally tried using the same settings, however this didn't actually work. In fact, any attempt at using the higher multiplier with a FSB above 200MHz would result in an instant bluescreen. I ended up dropping the FSB down to 190MHz and the multi to 20. I would then increase the FSB in increments of 5 until I again reach instability. This hit at 210MHz. At this point I decided to decrease the FSB by 1MHz until I had regained stability, and could last a good 8 hours of Prime95. I like my memory to run at its designated speeds, and I found that a multiplier of 8 brought it the closest to 1600MHz.