Let's start off by taking a quick look around the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5 motherboard.

Expansion on the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5 motherboard is covered by two PCI Express x1 slots, one PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot with x16 bandwidth, and another PCI Express x1 slot. The next cream-coloured slot is a legacy PCI slot. The peach slot is another PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot x4 connectivity (x8 in SLI or Crossfire mode). This is followed by a legacy PCI slot and one last peach PCI Express x16 slot with x4 connectivity.

The Intel P55 Express chipset next to the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5's PCI Express 2.0 x16 videocard slot.

In the lower left corner of the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5 motherboard we find the six 3Gb/s SATA II ports which can run in RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 modes. Gigabyte adds another four 3Gb/s SATA controllers to the mix which can be run in RAID 0, 1 and JBOD modes.

Plenty of space between the two PCI Express x16 slots for dual-slot wide videocards.

Gigabyte's GA-P55-UD5 motherboard supports up to 16GB of DDR3-800/1066/1333 memory (DDR3-2200 when overclocked) in four DIMMs. Along the bottom edge of the board is the ATX 24-pin power connector and IDE connector.

The 1156-pin CPU socket for Core i5 processors surrounded by solid-state aluminum capacitors and 24-phase power supply. This socket requires an 1156-pin Core i5 700-series or Core i7 800-series CPU, as well as a new size-compatible heatsink.

The heatsinks on the GA-P55-UD5 are compact, dissipating heat through use of fins. Certain expansion cards in the first PCI Express x1 expansion slot may have height clearance issues with the Intel P55 Express chipset heatsink.

Overclocking is up next, let's see how far we can push Gigabyte's GA-P55-UD5 motherboard compared to some of Intel's other P55 Express motherboards. To the test bench!