Motherboards can look alike from afar, but once you begin building a computer system with one you quickly realize where extra time has been spent to make your life easier. Gigabyte are going to be facing stiff competition from ASUS and MSI computer on the Intel P55 Express front, so here are a few of the refinements PCSTATS noticed on the GA-P55-UD5 board.

Big power switch and easily accessible hard reset and CMOS clear buttons. I almost always have to fix LED front panel header cables because the polarity on the LED cables gets mixed up, Gigabyte add polarity indicators and printing inside the header to clearly indicate which ports are USB2.0, and which are Firewire.

Combination PS/2 keyboard and mouse jacks are damn handy. Most mice are USB, but there are many keyboards still in use for PS/2. Though legacy, PS/2 keyboards from years gone by often have better tactile features than the newer, extremely inexpensive and flimsy keyboards being sold today in PC stores. ABIT tried to kill off PS/2, look where it ended up!

Combination USB2.0 and eSATA jacks are great if you have no use for eSATA in the first place. But really the point of these hybrid USB/eSATA cable slots is to provide power from the USB2.0 port to an eSATA device over one hybrid cable. eSATA alone cannot power a device, but there is enough electricity from a USB socket to power certain devices.

The Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5 motherboard is built on a 6-layer PCB, and according to the manufacturer 2 oz copper substrate is used for the inner grounding layers. The thicker layers of copper aid in the cooling of board mounted electrical component and lower impedance. PCSTATS toured a massive ECS factory in Shenzhen China last year where several million motherboard PCBs are fabricated each month. Trust us when we say, the more layers to a motherboard the more difficult it is to make and generally speaking, the better the quality.

The Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5 motherboard features a 24-phase power supply for the socket 1156 CPU, shown here above. The small black squares are low RDS MOSFETs, the larger grey cubes are Ferrite choke cores and the aluminum tins are Japanese made solid polymer capacitors.

That concludes PCSTATS preview of the new socket 1156 Intel P55 Express Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5 motherboard! Stay tuned for the full performance review, or check out a new motherboard right here.

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