Gigabyte P55A-UD6 Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

Intel P55 is a single-chip solution. The basic features provided by this chipset include six SATA-300 ports (RAID support is optional), 14 USB 2.0 ports supporting port disable, embedded Gigabit Ethernet MAC (Medium Access Control) and eight x1 PCI Express lanes. P55 does not support parallel ATA (PATA) ports.

Gigabyte P55A-UD6, however, has ten SATA ports, being six SATA-300, two eSATA and two SATA-600, and also one ATA-133 port. The blue ports seen in Figure 7 are SATA-300 controlled by the chipset, and they support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 (Intel Matrix Storage). The white ports are SATA-600, controlled by a Marvell 88SE9128 chip, supporting RAID 0 and 1. A JMicron JMB362 chip control two eSATA ports on the rear panel, supporting RAID 0, 1 and JBOD. There is also an ITE IT8213 chip that controls one ATA-133 port, supporting up to two IDE devices. This motherboard comes with an adapter that allows you to turn
two internal SATA ports into more two eSATA ports.

The ten SATA-300 connectors are placed facing the motherboard edge while the others are placed near the left edge of the motherboard, as you can see in Figure 7. This is a terrific solution, because on motherboards where the ports are facing up the video cards usually block the access to them or even completely prevent you from installing SATA cables on them.

Near the SATA ports you can see a two-digit display, which shows an error code in case of boot problems.

Figure 7: SATA Ports.

This motherboard has a floppy disk drive port, controlled by an ITE IT8729 chip.

Gigabyte P55A-UD6 offers 12 USB 2.0 ports from the 14 supported by the chipset, eight soldered on the rear panel and four available through internal headers. An interesting detail is the fact that two rear connectors are combo ones: they can either work as eSATA ports or as USB ports.

There is also two USB 3.0 ports on the rear panel, controlled by a NEC (Renesas) μD720200 chip. These ports achieve a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 5 Gbps (equivalent to 500 MB/s), against 480 Mbps (48 MB/s) of USB 2.0 ports.

This motherboard comes with a FireWire (IEEE 1394) controller with three FireWire ports, two soldered on the rear panel (one standard- and one miniature-sized) and one available on an internal header.

The audio section of this board is 7.1, produced by the south bridge chip with the aid of a Realtek ALC889 codec, which is one of the best available on the market, with a signal/noise ratio of 108 dB for its analog outputs and 104 dB at its analog inputs, so you can use this motherboard to work profissionally with audio and video editing with no need for a separated sound card. The motherboard provides independent analog audio outputs in 7.1 format, which is excellent. It also has coaxial and optical SPDIF outputs on its rear panel.

This motherboard has two Gigabit Ethernet ports controlled by two Realtek RTL8111D chips, which are connected to the system using PCI Express x1 lanes and therefore are able to achieve their maximum performance. These ports are compatible with "teaming" configuration, where both the ports are used as one in order to double the connection speed.

In Figure 8, you can see the rear panel of the motherboard: one PS/2 connector for keyboard or mouse (if you use it for a keyboard, you will need to use a USB mouse and vice-versa), eight USB 2.0 ports (two of them shared with eSATA ports), two USB 3.0 ports, SPDIF coaxial and optical outputs, two FireWire ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports and independent 7.1 analog audio outputs.

Figure 8: Rear panel.

Gigabyte P55A-UD6 has a legacy serial port, available through an internal header, but the motherboard does not come with the necessary bracket in order for you to use it.