Gigabyte P55-UD6

Of all the Intel P55 Express motherboards we've reviewed, Gigabyte's P55-UD6 is one of the more expensive models. Is it worth the extra outlay?

From an overclocking standpoint we have to say yes because the Gigabyte is a far more overclocking-friendly board. With the P55-UD6 you can over volt your CPU to 1.9-volts and when it comes to memory, you can force-feed a colossal 2.6-volts to your DDR3 modules. The Asus P7P55D Deluxe by comparison tops out at 1.628-volts and 2-volts respectively. If you plan to use the Gigabyte's maximum voltage settings however, we recommend you use incredibly strong cooling on both your CPU and memory modules or else they could be damaged or destroyed.

From a layout perspective the Gigabyte has a slight edge over the Asus Deluxe. This is because despite both boards being somewhat cramped, the P55-UD6 features six DDR3 DIMM slots versus four. While the Asus offers the same maximum memory limit as the Gigabyte, the latter allows you to be a little more flexible with your choice of memory modules.

Running the board and our Core i5 750 processor at standard speeds, the Gigabyte returned quick results though Asus' P7P55D Deluxe proved slightly faster. In our Sandra ‘Int buff' and ‘Float buff' memory benchmarks the P55-UD6 produced a figure of 17.17GB/sec whereas the Asus managed slightly higher at 17.19GB/sec. In our multimedia and application tests too we found the Gigabyte just a hair slower.